Officials in the Office of Homeland Security aren't the only ones who have difficulty differentiating the factual basis of information about terrorists.

Not long after September 11, a friend forwarded an e-mail describing how terrorist pilot "Mohammad Atta" blew up a bus in Israel in 1986. The Israelis captured, tried, and imprisoned him. The Oslo Agreement called for the release of "political prisoners," the e-mail said, but the Israelis wouldn't release those with "blood on their hands." It was only the intervention of a well-meaning American president, Ronald Reagan, and his secretary of state, George Schultz, which led to Atta's release.

The e-mail went on to add, "Thus Mr. Atta was freed and eventually 'thanked the US' by flying an airplane into tower one of the World Trade Center. This was reported by many of the networks at the time that the terrorists were first identified. It was censored in the USA from all later reports."

Well, maybe not. Not being a big believer in conspiracy theories about blanket media censorship, I expressed skepticism about this tale to my friend. A few days later, he wrote back, noting, "You couldn't have been more correct," and directed me to a debunking of this Internet myth at www.snopes2.com/rumors/atta.htm. As it turns out, a number of facts in the initial e-mail were incorrect and the person arrested in the 1986 attack in Israel, Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta, was 14 years older than the September 11 terrorist and had no involvement with the 2001 attack.

Among those taken in by the misinformation were the Australian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe, the latter of which reported, "At least one of the Boston hijackers, Mohamed Atta, was able to enter the United States despite having been implicated in a 1986 bus bombing in Israel, according to federal sources."

As snopes. com pointed out, the original e-mail message was wrong in its facts: "the Atta who attacked a bus was arrested by the FBI and extradited to Israel, not 'captured by the Israelis,' and his extradition didn't take place until two years after Reagan left office. In fact, the Olso Agreement itself wasn't signed until nearly five years after Reagan left office." Such factual shortcomings, snopes noted, made it puzzling that newspapers would run with the information in the first place.

Still, these kinds of stories sometimes take on a life of their own, and this one was no different. The tale of Atta slipping from Israelis, with the attendant media cover-up, recently turned up in the listener input section of the Web site of WHJJ talk-show host John DePetro, along with observations and rants about the Cianci trial.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: July 5 - 11, 2002