Fox News reported this morning that the Defense Department is going to deny the central Able Danger allegation that Mohammed Atta (and, presumably, the three other hijackers who have been linked to this controversy) were identified prior to the 9/11 attacks. As of 7:50am, I found nothing to confirm this report on either Fox’s or DoD’s websites.

While we await official word one way or the other from the Pentagon, a couple of other questions are worth pondering.

First, it has now been reported that Col. Shaffer has, as they say, some issues. His security clearance was apparently suspended in March 2004 for reasons unrelated to Able Danger. His lawyer describes those reasons as “petty and frivolous.” I would regard this as a cautionary sign, to say the least.

Even though the media has an infuriating habit of presenting lawyers as if they were objective, their job is to put the best spin on things that can be justified by the facts. Notice Shaffer’s lawyer is not saying, “that’s preposterous, there was no basis for this.” He’s admitting there’s something there, but minimizing its significance – in this instance, contending that a security clearance was pulled back over “a dispute over mileage reimbursement and charges for personal calls on a work cell phone,” according to Fox.

Is there more to it than that? At the moment we can’t say, but as Shaffer is currently the only witness who has come forward, and his version is currently both uncorroborated by contemporaneous documentation and contradicted by 9/11 Commission staffers, his credibility is something that bears watching closely.

Second, Democrat Commissioner Tim Roemer asks a reasonable question: How could Able Danger have gotten the photo of Atta alleged to have been on its chart of 60 or so terrorists if, at the time, Atta had not yet applied for a U.S. visa? Given that we don’t yet have evidence of there even being a picture, other than unsubstantiated witness recollection, it is certainly worth questioning what the source of the purported Atta photo could have been.