The Able Danger story has resurfaced the name of Jamie Gorelick, the former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration whose decision to raise the “wall” between domestic and foreign intelligence in retrospect played a major role in making the detection and prevention of the 9/11 attacks impossible.

As Andy McCarthy keeps pointing out, the 9/11 Commission report barely made mention of the “wall,” and when John Ashcroft and others spoke of it pointedly, Republicans on the commission were hotly defensive of Gorelick.

I’m getting e-mail from people asking why the Republicans on the 9/11 Commission were so solicitious of and good to Gorelick — among them, pretty tough-minded people like former Navy Secretary John Lehman.

Here’s my theory: Very early on, the commissioners decided that the Bush administration was their adversary. The Bushies didn’t want to share documents or give them access to documents, didn’t want anybody to testify, didn’t want Bush to testify, and so on — and they came to take this not only politically, but personally.

So my view is that the commissioners got all high and mighty with each other about how their efforts were being stymied, how they needed to get to the truth and were being hindered in their efforts, how the “families” deserved no less, etc. etc.

And so they all made common cause with each other because they decided they were facing a common enemy in the recalcitrant administration.

This development proved unexpectedly useful for Gorelick personally when the fact that decisions she had made in government were central to the Commission’s mandate to describe why this massive intelligence failure occurred. Because th commissioners had by this time become a team, united in their pursuit of the “truth” against the administration, they chose to side with their teammate — whom they had presumably come to know and like and admire as a person, which I don’t find hard to imagine.

That’s one possible explanation of why Republicans on the Commission were so soft when it came to Gorelick and the “wall,” and why therefore the Able Danger information could be given a flick of the hand by the commission staff.