In today’s edition of my paper, the New York Post (yes, you have to register, but so what), Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer tells Debbie Orin he did not remember the name of Mohammed Atta from the Able Danger charts when the 9/11 attacks hit. “Shaffer said Atta’s name didn’t ring a bell when he learned the hijackers’ names after 9/11. But he got ‘a sinking feeling in my stomach’ when the woman Ph.D. in charge of Able Danger’s data analysis told him Atta was one of those who had been identified as a likely Al Qaeda terrorist by Able Danger.

“‘My friend the doctor who did all the charts and ran the technology showed me the chart and said, “Look, we had this, we knew them, we knew this.’ And it was a sinking feeling, it was like, ‘Oh my God, you know. We could have done something.”

Alas, what this means is that we still don’t have first-hand testimony from the person who made the charts, or the charts themselves. If the person Shaffer is talking about is still on active duty, the Pentagon or the Defense Intelligence Agency should release her to talk about her work openly.

But I think this account gives me a little bit of backup after yesterday, when both Andy McCarthy — an American hero who has done more to expose and fight terrorism inside the United States than almost anybody — and Mark Steyn — a Canadian-West Indian-British-New Hampshire hero and the only other person in the conservative community besides me who knows the verse and refrain to “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” which may be the best American popular song ever written — questioned the idea that it might be difficult for some people to remember an individual name from a group of 60 other names.