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He's backtracking now after Andy McCarthy spanked his silly ass.

THE POINT IS TRAINING AND FOCUS, NOT ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY [Andy McCarthy ]
John, not to reopen this whole can of worms again – let’s please just agree to disagree about “blather and palaver” – one of your least impressive arguments (which is not to suggest that you haven’t made several good ones) has been this notion that “Mohammed Atta” is an obscure name that no one would remember. As you put the question to me a couple of days ago, making the same argument in the context of the naval intelligence officer who came forward in July 2004: “let's be honest here -- would you have remembered a specific name like ‘Mohammed Atta’ from a list of 60 names in 2000?”

In fact, if my job had been to investigate Islamic terrorist organizations, I would almost surely have remembered it. I can attest first-hand, just as you are suggesting, that I had a steep learning curve when I first began confronting a lot of Arabic names. It’s not hard, though, once you get steeped in it. In very short order, I knew my Mohammeds from my Muhammads.

Sixty names, moreover, is not a lot of names when we’re talking about something the observer has a heightened interest in – whether for professional or other reasons. I could probably, for example, give you the names of many more than 60 guys who have played for the Mets and the Yankees over the last decade or so. If I suddenly read that one of them had accomplished some breathtaking baseball feat, that would almost surely jar my memory that I had once known the guy as a journeyman utility infielder.

So when we’re talking about intelligence officials whose job was to focus on militant Islamic terror groups, I don’t think their memories of suspected terrorists can be judged in accordance with what a civilian or lay person would likely remember. It is instead a matter of what someone of that official’s training, occupation and focus might reasonably recall. That, by the way, is very similar to how courts evaluate whether there is probable cause for a search warrant: it is not a matter of how the layman would evaluate the evidence but what the police officer would believe it showed based on his unique training and experience.

To be clear, I am not vouching for the naval intelligence officer or Col. Shaffer. As I've noted with respect to the former, we don't know enough about what happened, and the fact that someone as able as commission staffer Dieter Snell appears to have rejected the naval officer's information gives me cause for pause. My only point is that it would be unwise to reject out-of-hand the accounts of intelligence officials whose job was tracking militant Islam by theorizing that they are unlikely to have remembered the names of those they were tracking.