Other than pointing fingers at officials, there is an important reason why the Commission's tailoring its report to fit its preconceived ideas matters. The Commission's report was used as the basis for policy decisions on intelligence gathering. The Commission's report is the sacred foundation for how we are going to approach intelligence from now on to prevent another 9/11. And, if there was information that was deliberately left out, for example, on Able Danger, then that would have had an effect. For example, Able Danger was based on data mining. And so was the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which the Defense Department had to stop when there were all sorts of protests against fears of violations of privacy erupted. Perhaps, we would have paid more attention to the benefits of data mining if we'd known that that technique had actually identified some of the 9/11 terrorists a year before the terror attacks. And that was the job of the Commission - to present a nonbiased look at what went wrong and make recommendations, not to weed out uncomfortable information that didn't fit their hypotheses.