Looks like Juliette got it right when she wrote recently:

It is ENTIRELY possible that the "data-mining techniques" that the Defense Department performed STARTED WITH the terror watchlists, linked them with known associates, followed computer trails, purchases, rental units, etc., and found Mr. Atta at the end of the line.  That's fabulous news, in my opinion, and the story here isn't that "data-mining works and all you privacy advocates shut up" but that a comprehensive watchlist program, that is actually investigated and followed, that is taken seriously, can lead us to very dangerous people.  

Kausfiles has proposed The "Two Atta" Theory, arguing that Able Danger actually turned up a Mohamed Atta who was a known terrorist for Abu Nida, whom the FBI arrested in 1987 on an Israeli warrant for attacking a bus filled with civilians on the West Bank in 1986. Kaus suggests that rather than coming up with Atta, the Able Danger folks may have started with him. Kaus quotes Tom Maguire to explain how it works.

If you were data mining for new terrorists, mightn't you start with him and see who his friends and connections were?  As [Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the guy claiming that the Pentagon had located Atta before 9/11] explained in an interview with Michael Savage, it,s all about linkages.

The real news here is that rather than fighting terrorism with tanks, the Pentagon was using techniques to identify networks -- to trace the links that allow individual terrorists to become a potent force across borders. That is finally fighting smart.

Check out "Wild Cards in the Japanese Election," by Jeff Laurenti, Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, for a very different and worrisome take on happenings in Japan. Laurenti claims that Koizumi may be taking the Japanese toward a new willingness to arm, if not to use force. He concludes, "So the September 11 election is not just another Japanese election reshuffling the same political cards and rearranging political faces, with little consequence for the world outside. There are some wild cards in this deck, and they could change East Asia's political game." Fellow bloggers who know about Japan, do you agree?