Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00 - New York Times (reg. required): "In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any American government agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of 2001."

The NY Times article is a bit confusing, but the upshot is military intelligence had some double super secret operation that used data mining techniques and had apparently identified 4 of the 9/11 hijackers, among others not involved, and did not tell the FBI about it until Spring 2001. The article is trying to say that there was some sort of problem with that. Sounds to me like everything was working fine. FBI was given the information well in advance of the attacks. I don't think civil laws/rights were violated. There may have been a breakdown in the FBI itself in using this information though. They may be indifferent to information that comes from outside the bureau. At any rate, this refutes the need for The Patriot Act doesn't it? We were able to gather information to prevent an attack without it weren't we? And the information was shared among military and domestic intelligence. If this report is to be believed then, the FBI fucked up big time. Maybe Richard Clarke is right that a little "shaking of the trees" from the top in the Summer of 2001 may have produced some action from the FBI on this information.

The article says there is no mention of this incident in the 9/11 Commission's report and hints that they did know about it. That in itself is very curious. Yet another commission designed not to get to THE truth, but to give them SOME truth.