...the final 9/11 Commission report, released on July 22, 2004, concluded that "American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks." This now looks to be embarrassingly wrong. Yet amazingly, commission leaders acknowledged on Aug. 12 that their staff in fact met with a Navy officer 10 days before releasing the report, who "asserted that a highly classified intelligence operation, Able Danger, had identified Mohammed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn." (Capt. Phillpott says he briefed them in July 2004.) The commission's statement goes on to say that the staff determined that "the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation," and that the intelligence operation "did not turn out to be historically significant," despite substantial corroboration from other seasoned intelligence officers.

This dismissive and apparently unsupported conclusion would have us believe that a key piece of evidence was summarily rejected in less than 10 days without serious investigation. The commission, at the very least, should have interviewed the 80 members of Able Danger, as the Pentagon did, five of whom say they saw "the chart." But this would have required admitting that the late-breaking news was inconveniently raised. So it was grossly neglected and branded as insignificant. Such a half-baked conclusion, drawn in only 10 days without any real investigation, simply ignores what looks like substantial direct evidence to the contrary coming from our own trained military intelligence officers...