The situation regarding top secret Pentagon data mining operation known as Able Danger is at the moment, confused - to say the least.

On the one hand, you have Rep. “Crazy” Curt Weldon backtracking on the story as his main source - a source that the 9/11 Commission admits met with staffer Deitrich Snell on July 12, 2004 and relayed information that Atta was pegged by the Able Danger team a year before 9/11 - has said that he had no corroborative paperwork to back up his contention about Atta.

On the other hand, you have this story in today’s Washington Times which quotes a second source (who met with Commission staffers in Pakistan in October, 2003) as saying that he did in fact inform the Commission that the Able Danger team had indeed uncovered information about Mohammed Atta and that he tried to tell the Commission again in January:

The intelligence official said he was interviewed in October 2003 by members of the September 11 commission staff, including Executive Director Philip Zelikow, and sought to arrange a follow-up meeting that the staff had requested when he returned from Afghanistan in January 2004, but was rebuffed.

“They took good notes and scribbled the entire time I talked. Two staffers took four to five pages of notes each. Other members from Special Ops Command also were in attendance,” he said, adding that he was “shocked” in January 2004 when the staff members told him, “We don’t need to talk to you.”

Mr. Weldon said he wants to know “who made the decision and why was it never mentioned in the final document. … It would have changed the completion on the final 9/11 report.”

I speculated in this post that there were probably two separate sources for the Able Danger information since the 9/11 Commission met with another intelligence officer in October.

To have that source confirm that he talked about Mohammed Atta and the team’s inability to report their information to the FBI throws just a little bit different light on the matter.

Jim Geraghty is pissed at Weldon for his backtracking. But its obvious Geraghty did not see the article in the Washington Times. And Geraghty’s scoop that the Pentagon is going to be releasing Able Danger information that won’t have any “bombshells” is hardly surprising.

What is surprising, is this little tidbit from the Times article that’s pretty much of any eye opener:

But Pentagon officials have said they have uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Able Danger unit concerning an Atta-led terrorist cell, other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name, and September 11 commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton disputed the source of the information.

Really? And why no mention of these “analyses” in the 9/11 Commission Final Report? The Captain:

This story has not yet run its course, not by a long shot. Something strange has been going on with Able Danger. Either it did a much better job identifying terrorists than anyone wants to acknowledge, or it uncovered something else that no one wants to release. Either way, Congress needs to start hauling people into the open and start asking for sworn testimony on this program and exactly how much the Commission knew about it.

This second source makes this a whole new ball game.

And let me say again; even with that information in hand, I doubt whether we could have prevented 9/11. Also, it’s tempting to get ahead of ourselves on this story and read more into it than is there. But if the 9/11 Commission staff is lying, don’t you think that’s something we should know? It worries me that the staffers may have pulled a “Sandy Berger” and sanitized Commission records when they were in the National Archives last week. But a Congressional hearing would uncover something like that easily.

Does Weldon have enough credibility left to convene such a hearing? Not if the Democrats have anything to say about it. However, if two different sources come forward to corroborate Weldon’s charges, Congress may have no choice but to use its power of oversight and subpoena to get to the bottom of this.

UPDATE

AJ at The Strata-Sphere has news:

Rep. Curt Weldon said Monday that one or more members of an elite team of military intelligence officers who had identified al Qaeda hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist threat two years before he led the 9/11 attacks are prepared to go public.

“I can guarantee you that you will be able to have one on your show,” Weldon told ABC Radio host Sean Hannity. “You might want to go with your TV show with this, because it will be a major story,” the Pennsylvania Republican urged. “And you can interview him directly.”

Now that’s an interview I’m not going to miss.