This story on Able Danger and the 9/11 Commission gets interestinger and interestinger. Just yesterday Commission members were denying being briefed on Able Danger and the information that the military intelligence group had gathered warning in the summer of 2000 that Mohammed Atta was connected to Al Qaeda. This is what the spokesman for the Commission said in Tuesday's New York Times.

According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.

Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.

"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."

Their story seems to have shifted a bit today. Now, they're saying that they were briefed on the conclusions of military intelligence regarding Atta but they disregarded them. They had their conclusion and weren't going to alter it.

The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader.

But aides to the Republican congressman who has sought to call attention to the military unit that conducted the secret operation said such a conclusion relied too much on specific dates involving Mr. Atta's travels and not nearly enough on the operation's broader determination that he was a threat

It seems that Lee Hamilton has lit a fire underneath the Commission staff to send them scurrying to find out what they actually knew about the military intelligence briefing.

In an interview with FOX News, Hamilton said there should be a comprehensive review by Congress and the Pentagon into the claims. He said this potentially cruicial information could change the way history sees Sept. 11, 2001.

Members of the commission are reviewing claims that more than a year before the 2001 attacks defense intelligence officials had identified ringleader Mohammed Atta (search) and three other hijackers, and that they were already inside the United States. A statement could come by the end of the week

"The Sept. 11 commission (search) did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

Congressman Weldon, a Republican, is happy to focus the blame on the Clinton administration.

....Weldon said that in September 2000, the unit recommended on three separate occasions that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation, arguing that Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.

"Lawyers within the administration — and we're talking about the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration — said 'you can't do it,'" and put post-its over Atta's face, Weldon said. "They said they were concerned about the political fallout that occurred after Waco ... and the Branch Davidians."

So, if there was military intelligence about a potential Al Qaeda member in the United States potentially to organize a terror attack, why wasn't that information disseminated throughout the FBI and law enforcement? Could it be because of the sensitivity that we formerly had about targeting Muslims? Could it be because of that "wall" between military intelligence and the FBI? The New York Times mentions a "sense of discomfort" about sharing such information.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

Captain Ed thinks that he knows why the Commission didn't do more to look into this report.

Why didn't the Commission press harder for military intelligence, and if the Times' source has told the truth, why did they ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations? It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the Commission made it seem, but primarily political -- and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick.

Perhaps you've forgotten who Jamie Gorelick is. She was the former Clinton Justice Department official who established that "wall of separation" between law enforcement and intelligence operations. And she sat on the 9/11 Commission. You might think that was a conflict of interest but the Commission members all circled around her in protest when her conflict of interest was made note of during the Commission's investigations. Here is what the Washington Times wrote at the time.

The disclosure that Jamie Gorelick, a member of the September 11 commission, was personally responsible for instituting a key obstacle to cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence operations before the terrorist attacks raises disturbing questions about the integrity of the commission itself. Ms. Gorelick should not be cross-examining witnesses; instead, she should be required to testify about her own behavior under oath. Specifically, commission members need to ask her about a 1995 directive she wrote that made it more difficult for the FBI to locate two of the September 11 hijackers who had already entered the country by the summer of 2001.
On Tuesday, Attorney General John Ashcroft declassified a four-page directive sent by Ms. Gorelick (the No. 2 official in the Clinton Justice Department) on March 4, 1995, to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Mary Jo White, the New York-based U.S. attorney investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the memo, Ms. Gorelick ordered Mr. Freeh and Ms. White to follow information-sharing procedures that "go beyond what is legally required," in order to avoid "any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance" that the Justice Department was using Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, instead of ordinary criminal investigative procedures, in an effort to undermine the civil liberties of terrorism suspects. (none)

Hmmm. Now we have a story that the Commission was given information on a military intelligence conclusion regarding Mohammed Atta more than a year before 9/11 and they disregarded it because the dates didn't confirm what they thought they knew about Atta's travels. As if we can be sure that we know every moment of Atta's travels in the years while he was planning the attack.

And what of the 9/11 widows who drew so much publicity in their support of the 9/11 Commission and their calls for answers? They want more investigation.

group of Sept. 11 widows called the September 11th Advocates issued a statement Wednesday saying they were "horrified" to learn that further possible evidence exists, and they are disappointed the Sept. 11 commission report is "incomplete and illusory."

"The revelation of this information demands answers that are forthcoming, clear and concise," the statement said. "The Sept. 11 attacks could have and should have been prevented."

So now we have to have an investigation of the Commission that was supposed to be the final and complete investigation.
There are lots of bloggers who have more on this. Check out Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin, The Anchoress, Just One Minute, and follow their links.

Given the difficulty that we're having now figuring out what was going on before 9/11, my heart goes out to the policy makers who have to make some sense about all this information in real time and make decisions based on incomplete and contradictory information. And they know that they will be blamed if they guess wrong. I don't think there is any solution to this. We are never going to have complete intelligence and yet, presidents and other policy makers are going to have to make decisions based on whatever it is they know. All we can do is try to have the best analysis possible and hope that it is right.