The NYTimes confirms this morning what we noted here late yesterday: the Defense Department is preventing its military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning about the Able Danger intelligence program – from which five participants have now come forward and indicated that top suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta – and perhaps other hijackers – was identified as a likely al Qaeda operative long before the 9/11 attacks.

This is very difficult to understand. Of course we do not want needlessly to expose intelligence methods and sources. But the historical fact of whether Atta was identified as a terrorist before the attacks is highly significant, and it is simply not necessary to get into the sensitive nuts and bolts of the program’s data-mining techniques in order to get a straight answer to that question. We deal with this kind of dilemma all the time in the criminal justice system, and Sen. Specter, the Judiciary Committee Chairman and a highly experienced prosecutor, is uniquely well qualified to conduct a hearing that can get to the facts the public is entitled to know without compromising our intelligence capabilities.

Moreover, the sensitive stuff can always be shared with senators who have appropriate clearances in closed session. The Pentagon is not even permitting that. Why?

Remember the vaunted 9/11 Commission hearings? We were told that it was so urgently important that the public understand accurately the history of government counter-terrorism activities prior to the attacks that all manner of classified information was declassified – including, famously, a presidential daily brief from the intelligence community (among the most sensitive documents generated by the government) outlining the al Qaeda threat circa August 2001. Indeed, under great political and media pressure, the president’s then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice was compelled to give hours of sworn public testimony about everything she and the administration did from January 2001 through 9/11.

Why is it that this was important enough for the National Security Adviser but somehow not important enough for a group of intelligence operatives in connection with a program that hasn’t existed anymore for years?