This did not make it into the 9/11 Commission report.

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

And what did the Clinton Defense Department do with this information?

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because [of]...a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

This must be the Jamie Gorelick doctrine. Read the whole thing. Aside from showing the lackadaisical nature of the government bureacracy, apparently except for the uniformed military, this article demonstrates the efficacy of and need for powerful data-mining software to identify patterns and pick needles out of haystacks. Unfortunately, the privacy zealots prefer dead Americans to data mining.

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