THE 9/11 OMISSION COMMISSION
NEW YORK Post Opinion
August 15, 2005 -- What did Tom Kean and his 9/11 Com mission members know — and when did they know it?
It's outrageous enough to learn — via Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) — that a classified military-intelligence unit, working out of the Army's Information Dominance Center and code-named "Able Danger," identified 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and three others as members of a Brooklyn-based terrorist cell fully a year before the World Trade Center attacks.
And it's more outrageous still to discover that the Pentagon never handed over the information to the FBI — under orders from Pentagon lawyers.
But now it's been disclosed that, despite initial denials, the staff of Kean's commission twice was told this alarming story — but rejected the information and refused to inform the commission members or even refer to it in their final report.
This, from a commission that was tasked to uncover the full story of 9/11 and shed light on why it happened.
On Friday, Kean & Co. said the operation was not considered "historically significant." But make no mistake: These facts are critical to a complete understanding of the conditions that permitted 9/11 to take place.
Had the Pentagon information been passed along to the FBI, it's possible the terrorist attack would have succeeded nonetheless.
But it's also possible it wouldn't have.
Either way, the orders preventing the passage of information surely didn't help.
And, just as surely, their role in the story should have been recognized in the 9/11 Commission's official report.
Equally disturbing is the possibility that the commission ignored the information to protect one of its own members, Democratic attorney Jamie Gorelick.
As a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Gorelick wrote the infamous order creating a "wall of separation" that precluded intelligence on terrorists from being shared with law-enforcement agencies — the very "wall" that kept Able Danger from passing along the information it had uncovered on Mohammed Atta.
As The Post's Deborah Orin reported Friday, then-U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White — who headed up key terrorism prosecutions, like the first WTC bombing — blasted Gorelick's order in blistering memos at the time.
But the memos, like the Able Danger information itself, were not included in the Kean Commission's final report.
When Gorelick's order first came to light, and critics demanded she quit the commission and instead appear as a witness under oath, Kean bristled.
"People ought to stay out of our business," Kean huffed.
Now, sadly, Americans are learning the price of not having held the commission's feet to the fire.
Kean and his fellow commissioners have been barnstorming the country, arrogantly demanding more information from the White House, even though they've concluded their work and the commission has officially disbanded.
Before Kean & Co. start making demands on the White House for information, it's time they started providing some of their own information to the people they were meant to serve.
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