The 9/11 Commission was supposed to give the America people a complete, unbiased story of the government failures that led up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. But the Commission now admits its acclaimed Final Report ignored key information provided by a U.S. Army data mining project, Able Danger, which identified Mohammed Atta and several other hijackers as potential terrorists prior to the September 11 attacks. The Able Danger team recommended that Atta and the other suspected terrorists be deported. That recommendation, however, was not shared with law enforcement officials, presumably because of the “wall” between intelligence activities and domestic law enforcement.

According to the New York Times, the 9/11 Commission officials said that Able Danger had not been included in their report because some of the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.

In other words, the Commission staffers were told about the project but ignored it because it didn’t fit their pre-conceived conclusions.

Fortunately, the Commission has now ‘fessed up. But not before trying to avoid blame earlier this week. Lee Hamilton, one of the Commission’s co-chairs, said:

The Sept. 11 commission 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.”

Ed Morrissey, who has been following the story closely, comments on the Commission’s blame-avoidance techniques and speculates as to why Able Danger was excluded from the Commission’s report:

First we hear that no such [briefing] occurred. After that, the Commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the Commission had two meetings where [they] heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, “Hey, wait a minute — this changes the picture substantially,” and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had.

Why? Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the US provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9/11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn’t know what mission he had at the time.

What does that mean for the Commission’s findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action — if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.

So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why. And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the “wall” for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta’s ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.

Morrissey expanded on the latter point in an earlier post:

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.

We will be hearing much more about this story. For blogger reactions, check out Morrissey, The Jawa Report, Baldilocks, Just One Minute, and The Anchoress. For more on Gorelick’s conflict of interest, see here, here, and here.

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Updates:

Jim Geraghty says Able Danger may be one of the biggest stories to come down the pike in awhile. He’s right. And check out Geraghty’s takedown of 9/11 Commission’s work:

[A]s for the 9/11 Commission, after all that patting themselves on the back, all that gushing praise from left, right, and center, after their work was called “miraculous” by Newsday, and the nomination for a National Book Award, and calling their own work “extraordinary”… man, these guys stink. Really, if this checks out, and the staffers had information like this and they disregarded it, never believing that we in the public deserved to know that the plot’s ringleader was identified, located and recommended to be arrested a year before the attacks… boy, these guys ought to be in stocks in the public square and have rotten fruit thrown at them. What a sham.

More at Villainous Company: “The Farce Continues”

Bryan Preston demands some answers.

Media Matters points out that the “wall” separating intelligence activities from law enforcement was erected in the 1980s, well before Bill Clinton was elected. That’s true. But as the Wall Street Journal noted last year, Gorelick bears responsibility too:

[T]he wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history–into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick–then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner–instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of “appearances” they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required.

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