We've written about reports that a secret Pentagon unit, called Able Danger, identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as a likely terrorist a year before the September 11 attack. Astonishingly, the September 11 commission chose to omit this from its final report. And it looks like the Commission's gross negligence, which it seemingly tried to conceal, is being revealed.

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.

Now for an outrageous excuse.

Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.

How likely is it that the commission staff members was so incompetent that they did not remember being told that the Pentagon identified the tactical leader of the attack they were investigating? So, why did the Commission apparently try to suppress this information. We may need a new commission to investigate the old commission. At least Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) is all over this issue.

In a letter sent Wednesday to members of the commission, Mr. Weldon criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its "refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose."

Here is the barn-burner.

He has asserted that the Able Danger unit, whose work relied on computer-driven data-mining techniques, sought to call their superiors' attention to Mr. Atta and three other future hijackers in the summer of 2000. Their work, he says, had identified the men as likely members of a Qaeda cell already in the United States.

The implications are enormous. It means we probably have more of an ability to identify, track and intercept terrorists than we had thought, but that bureaucratic and political considerations are hampering security efforts. Over-zealous "civil rights" and "privacy" activists, like Jamie Gorelick and her PC-inspired wall or the ACLU and its PC-inspired obstruction, are risking lives to soothe their partisan hysteria. Maybe now the hyper-libertarian luddites, who have a bizarre fear of data mining, will realize that 3,000 people already paid with their lives for the Clinton DoD's reticence to use data. How long will it take before Americans demand that the government actually do all it can to protect us, and kick the Gorelicks and ACLU-types to the curb?

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