- WASHINGTON - A Pentagon
employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta
as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday.
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- The employee is prepared to testify next week before
the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person
who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt
Weldon, R-Pa.
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- Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality
matters. Weldon described the documents as "2.5 terabytes" "
as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of
Congress, he added.
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- A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said the witnesses
for Wednesday hearing had not been finalized and could not confirm Weldon's
comments.
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- Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman, said
officials have been "fact-finding in earnest for quite some time."
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- "We've interviewed 80 people involved with Able
Danger, combed through hundreds of thousands of documents and millions
of e-mails and have still found no documentation of Mohamed Atta,"
Swiergosz said.
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- He added that certain data had to be destroyed in accordance
with existing regulations regarding "intelligence data on U.S. persons."
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- Weldon has said that Atta, the mastermind of the attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, and three other hijackers were identified in 1999 by
a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger,"
which determined they could be members of an al-Qaida cell.
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- On Wednesday, former members of the Sept. 11 commission
dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions. One commissioner, ex-Sen.
Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said, "Bluntly, it just didn't happen and that's
the conclusion of all 10 of us."
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- Weldon responded angrily to Gorton's assertions.
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- "It's absolutely unbelievable that a commission
would say this program just didn't exist," Weldon said Thursday.
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- Pentagon officials said this month they had found three
more people who recall an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist
prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
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- Two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer
and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, have come forward to support Weldon's claims.
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