"Congressman: Atta papers destroyed on orders" - pegging weirdness

[FormerRepublican]

"Pentagon denies having any documents on lead hijacker prior to 9/11

Updated: 3:53 a.m. ET Sept. 16, 2005
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.

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.

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.

A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said the witnesses for Wednesday's hearing had not been finalized and could not confirm Weldon’s comments.

Pentagon: Nothing found
Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman, said officials have been “fact-finding in earnest for quite some time.”

“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.

He added that certain data had to be destroyed in accordance with existing regulations regarding “intelligence data on U.S. persons.”"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9342936/