Claims by two people who worked on the project - code-named Able Danger - that they were ignored by commission staff when they briefed them have touched off a firestorm of criticism: including allegations from some victims' relatives of a cover-up.

"Other people have questions they need to answer," Al Felzenberg, the spokesman for the commission's embattled successor body, the 9-11 Public Discourse Project told United Press International.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States disbanded after publishing its report in July last year, when its mandate expired. But its members formed the public discourse project to follow up on their work.

"The American people deserve answers," Felzenberg said, adding that both the White House and the Pentagon had left questions about the issue unresolved for weeks - something other commission sources say has exposed them to a fierce backlash.

"They are sitting on their hands and we are swinging in the wind," complained one former commission official.

Others, including Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, say the commission is merely getting "a little bit of its own medicine," being second-guessed in hindsight much as it judged the actions of officials before Sept. 11.

"In hindsight it is always easy to see people's mistakes," Hoekstra told UPI. "You have to be sympathetic to people in hindsight. More sympathetic than they were."

At the center of the controversy is a claim that Able Danger, a data-mining project that trawled vast quantities of open source information for patterns, linkages and associations, produced a chart in 2000 bearing the names (and in some case, photographs) of about 60 people thought linked to al-Qaida.

Among them was Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the attacks, according to five people who worked on the project.

If their recollections prove to be accurate, they will entail a major re-write of the commission's accounts of the missed opportunities to thwart the attacks.

But many questions remain.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., a passionate advocate of data-mining technology, and the man who first publicized the claims about Able Danger, has said repeatedly that he gave a copy of the chart to Steven Hadley, now the national security advisor, at the White House on Sept. 25, 2001, and that Hadley said he would show it to the president.

The chart Weldon gave to Hadley, if it exists, may be the only copy that remains. Last week Pentagon officials told reporters that vast quantities of data from Able Danger were destroyed as a matter of routine.

The White House has point blank refused to comment on Weldon's statements about the meeting, or to allow reporters to interview Mr. Hadley about them.

"It would be helpful if Mr. Hadley would answer those questions," said Felzenberg. "He could make this whole thing go away."

Weldon says he does not know why the White House refuses to comment, but told UPI that at a meeting in June, Hadley acknowledged meeting him in September 2001 and receiving the chart.

"I've never had a detailed discussion about it with him, but he remembered the meeting," Weldon said.

Hoekstra says that his committee is conducting inquiries, and "the people who've been reported to have information that could help answer these questions are the Pentagon and the National Security Council."

But he declined to discuss what inquiries committee staff had made. "We don't talk about what we investigate or how," he said.

Commission staff say that - in the absence of any corroboration among the papers they had received about Able Danger - they did not believe the accounts about the project they received.

"We had two-and-a-half million pieces of paper we'd crowbarred out of the administration," said Felzenberg, referring to the uphill struggle the commission had to get documents about their pre-Sept. 11 activities from federal agencies. "We'd interviewed 1,200 people."

"It was (their) story stacked up against these mountains of material - none of which mentioned Atta before Sept. 11 or this famous chart," he concluded.

Hoekstra said the commission "may have been blindsided by their own stove-piped thinking" - a reference to one of the panel's more famous criticisms of how U.S. intelligence was organized. "(They may have thought) that information that comes through unconventional channels isn't worth looking into."

"But that's hindsight," he added.

The Pentagon said last week that it had again searched millions of documents -- including many not turned over to the commission - but had found neither the chart nor any reference to it.

Nonetheless, they said that a total of five people who had worked on the project remembered seeing a chart with Atta's name on it, and called them "credible."

Felzenberg says that response raises more questions than it answers.

"Did they have Mohammed Atta in their sights before Sept. 11?" he asked. "They stand accused of that. People they say are credible are accusing them of calling off the dogs," Felzenberg said, a reference to charges that Pentagon lawyers blocked the Able Danger team from passing information to the FBI.

"Anything they say now only raises questions about what they told us then," he said.

The Defense Department was notorious among commission staff as the most recalcitrant government agency when it came to document production.

"At every agency there was an element of CYA about the handling of our document requests, but (the Department of Defense) was the most difficult to get material out of," said one.

"The bureaucracy there was just so, so thick... The people on the ground were awesome, but they'd say 'Yes, you can have something,' and that would be the start of this slippery slope. It was such a vast bureaucracy, and so many people had to sign off on anything, sooner or later there'd be someone who'd say 'No.'

"Usually a lawyer."

Felzenberg insists that history will absolve the commission.

"If it turns out that the commission missed this, that will be a failure on our part. But if it turns out (the Pentagon) had (Mohamed Atta) in their sights and let him get away, that is a much bigger failure."

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