Five members of "Able Danger," a Defense Department intelligence program, have said that Mohamed Atta was identified as a potential terrorist long before the 9/11 attacks

National Review, Sept 26, 2005

Five members of "Able Danger," a Defense Department intelligence program, have said that Mohamed Atta was identified as a potential terrorist long before the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon has found no documentary corroboration that this is so, although its spokesman recently conceded--conveniently--that corroborating documents may have been destroyed.

Why might we have lost Atta? Prior to 9/11, the Defense Department strictly interpreted regulations forbidding the collection even of open-source material on "U.S. persons," a bizarre term whose precise definition includes, among others, legal aliens--and, by extension, covert terrorists here on student visas. It is entirely possible, then, that intelligence on Atta was destroyed not because it was judged irrelevant to national security, but simply because it had been collected in the first place. One would have expected the 9/11 commission to be interested in that possibility; instead, its final report failed even to mention the information it had been given about an Atta identification. The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning to hold hearings. May it improve on the commission.