Atta was identified in 2000?

How come we’re just hearing about this now? How come none of this is mentioned in the report by the 9/11 commission?

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

This story is written in a very convoluted way, as though the writer submitted copy and had it chopped up in editing. You have to read the whole thing but I can’t help but read this and wonder what in blazes Jamie Gorelick was thinking when she dreamed up the “wall” between the CIA and the FBI:

…Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.

Hmmmph. Maybe that’s why this wasn’t included in the 9/11 report, since Ms. Gorelick was, after all, on the panel.

Ed Morrissey has much, much more on this story, including the skeptics take on it. You’ll want to read his whole post