More Questions for the 9/11 Commission

Ed Morrissey, proprietor of the Captain's Quarters blog, has an interesting piece in the Daily Standard outlining another curious ommission of the 9/11 Commission: their failure to mention the arrests in Germany of two Iraqi intelligence agents in March 2001 during the same time period when three of the four 9/11 cell leaders separately travelled to Germany from the US.

In a related story in today's NYT by Philip Shenon, a reserve Army intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer has gone public with allegations that military lawyers prevented the Able Danger team from contacting the FBI in 2000 and 2001 with information about Mohamed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers. (The NYT deserves a lot of credit for breaking this story and staying with it.)

I don't know if there is anything to all of these allegations, but given the number and nature of the questions regarding significant ommissions from the 9/11 Commission's report, there is clearly a need for more work to answer the question of why the attacks of 9/11 were successful and who in the US government knew any parts of the intelligence puzzle beforehand. Similarly, what role did the legal policies of the Clinton administration (authored by 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick) play in preventing the flow of intelligence information from the Able Danger team to the FBI?