A US military intelligence team identified four September 11th hijackers, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, as likely members of an al Qaeda cell in the United States over a year before the 2001 attacks, a former team member and a Republican congressman said last night.
The classified eight-member team, code-named "Able Danger," produced a chart with photographs of Atta and three other hijackers in 2000 and unsuccessfully sought to pass the information on to the FBI.
Mr Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of both the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said the information was provided to the staff of the September 11th commission but some commissioners were never briefed on the material.
The panel's 2004 final report examining the attacks on New York and Washington contained no information suggesting that the US government knew the hijackers were operating inside the United States as early as 2000.
Mr Lee Hamilton, the commission's former vice chairman, said panel staff interviewed "Able Danger" members in Afghanistan in October 2003 and later reviewed documents on the operation supplied on request by the Bush administration.
"Neither in the documents nor in the conversations was there any mention of a Mohammed Atta or his cell," Mr Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, told Reuters in an interview. "There was no mention of Mohammed Atta and no mention of any military surveillance of him."
The former military intelligence official insists he personally told September 11th commission staff members about Atta in Afghanistan, and offered to supply them with documents upon his return to the United States, only to be rebuffed.
Former September 11th commission spokesman Mr Al Felzenberg said on Tuesday that the panel's former staff would review internal memos and other documents to make sure information about Atta was not overlooked.
"We will know by the end of the week whether we missed something," Mr Felzenberg said.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was unaware of the intelligence information.
"Able Danger," now disbanded, was a small classified military operation engaged in data-mining analysis of "open source" information including media reports and public records through the use of massively powerful computer systems.