My good friend and fellow Philadelphia Daily News columnist Michael Smerconish has an important and incredible column today about the airline worker in Maine who encountered Mohammed Atta on 9/11:

MICHAEL Tuohey “stared the devil in the eyes and didn’t recognize him.”

Now he kicks himself for not having acted, although if he had, our government probably would’ve punished him for trying to take the devil down.

Until recently, Tuohey worked the ticket counter at the airport in Portland, Maine, first for Allegheny Airlines, and then its successor, US Airways. He’ll never forget one particular day of his 34 years of employment.

It began like any other. This married Army vet had a routine. He’d wake up at 3:30 a.m. and walk to the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee from the machine he’d pre-set the night before. Then he’d flicked on the TV, watch some CNN and check the weather forecast. After feeding his cat, he’d jump in his car for the 15-minute drive to work.

On most days, the big rush would come 6-7:30 a.m. That’s when the tiny Maine airport would be abuzz with travelers heading for connecting flights in Philadelphia, Boston and Pittsburgh. But it’s what happened at 5:43 a.m. on a particular day that he replays in his mind over and over.

At that time on a Tuesday, two men wearing sport coats and ties approached his counter with just 17 minutes to spare before their flight to Boston. (Tuohey now knows they’d stayed the night before at the Comfort Inn down the road.) And he suspects they arrived late to take advantage of an airline system that was then “more concerned about on-time departure than effective screening.”

He thought the pair were unusual. First, they each held a $2,500 first-class, one-way ticket to Los Angeles (via Boston). “You don’t see many of those.”

The second reason is not so easy to explain.

“It was just the look on the one man’s face, his eyes,” Tuohey recently told me.

“By now, everyone in America has seen a picture of this man, but there is more life in that photograph we’ve all seen than he had in the flesh and blood. He looked like a walking corpse. He looked so angry. And he wouldn’t look directly at me.”

The man was Mohamed Atta…

Read the whole thing. It’s a vital lesson for all of us to listen to our gut instincts the next time around, so there isn’t another next time around.

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Commentary on Smerconish’s piece at Unconsidered Trifles and LGF.