Whoa there, walkback that walkback!

This thing gets stranger and stranger.

First Weldon made his charge and the 9/11 Commission, caught unawares and in the middle of a lolling, hot August said, “it never happened/we never saw it/yes, we saw it/yes, we saw it and remember vast details and Weldon has lied.”

Now, Jim Geraghty at TKS wonders if the Mike Kelly from the Bergen Record in NJ has a scoop which will bring the 9/11 Commission back from the beaches yet again:

For a year before the 9/11 attacks, the Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the hijacking plot that killed almost 3,000 people…

A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. “But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI.”

The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn. That’s how close all this was – to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops.

The 11-person group called itself “Project Able Danger.” Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.

The technique is called “data mining.” The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records.

From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names – Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

All four turned out to be hijackers. Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.

What is interesting about this information now is that a CIA team, working separately from the Able Danger Team, had set its sights on al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The two were already on a CIA terror watch list and still had managed to obtain U.S. visas.

The CIA feared al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi might try to slip into the United States. But the CIA lost track of them after they left a terror meeting in Malaysia in early 2000 for Bangkok. Worse, the CIA waited until the summer of 2001 to tell the FBI that two suspected terrorists had visas to enter the United States – and might be here…

By mid-2000, the Able Danger team knew it had important information about a possible terrorist plot. Because of a peculiar series of computer links that went through Brooklyn, the team began referring to the four future hijackers as the “Brooklyn cell.” Their movements and communications were raising too many suspicions.

You’ll want to read it all. Especially the part about how even after 9/11 the Able Danger team did not come forward, ostensibly because they feared what happens to whistleblowers.

At this point, I have no faith in commissions or investigations, but it does seem to me Congress needs to get to the bottom of all of this. The bi-partisan 9/11 seems bi-partisanly suspect…as does, it must be said, Weldon. Someone’s lying. Let’s find out who it is.

Afterthought. The Bergen Record reporter’s name is Mike Kelly. Can you imagine what the late, great Michael Kelly would be writing about all of this?