John, I watched the hearing this morning, and that is not gonna wash.

Both DOD and the 9/11 Commission put out numerous statements casting aspersions on the Able Danger people who came forward on the ground that no documentary information corroborated the claim – a claim no one seems too willing to go out on a limb to dispute any longer – that the program identified Mohamed Atta as a potential terrorist (and perhaps other hijackers, too) well in advance of 9/11.

Now it turns out that volumes upon volumes of documentation from the program were ordered destroyed in 2000. That also appears to have been a rather widely known fact (the guy who did the deleting voluntarily testified at the hearing). If that was the case, why were these witnesses assailed the way they were? And why did we continue hearing about how the Pentagon was looking under every rock but not finding anything when, in fact, it had to have known that the entire quarry had intentionally been destroyed five years ago?

What is unfolding here is an embarrassing story. Data mining efforts harvested some information on US persons (essentially, citizens and permanent resident aliens) in the course of investigating al Qaeda (and later, Chinese proliferation). But Atta was not a US person. There was no impropriety in collecting information on him, nor does it smack of any McCarthy-era list-making – these are the lists everyone knows we are allowed to make and should be making. There is no question that al Qaeda was being investigated by other arms of government at that time – and that such lists were being made.

Moreover, let’s assume – against the facts – that there had been some legal problem collecting this information. The regs under which DOD was operating gave it 90 days – if it happened to collect info on US persons in the course of its legitimate intelligence missions, like counterterrorism – to determine whether there was a lawful basis to keep the information. There are 13 bases for retaining such information, and they should easily have allowed al Qaeda information about non-Americans to be preserved.

But it appears that not enough attention was given during the 90-day period to whether there was a legal basis to keep the info, so the period lapsed. Thus, because the officials in possession of the materials did not want to be in violation of the reg (AR 3-81.10, the intelligence oversight reg), they were destroyed before a responsible determination could be made whether they were retainable.

That destruction is said to have been over the objection of Able Danger officials but at the insistence of the lawyers – notwithstanding that it was known to contain potentially valuable information about al Qaeda (which had only recently blown up two of our embassies and would soon bomb one of our navy destroyers).

It is, moreover, alleged that, even though the documentation had been destroyed, an Able Danger briefing was given to Gen. Shelton (of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) in January 2001. And it came up in a briefing given to Stephen Cambone – then a top advisor to Sec’y Rumsfeld and now undersecretary for intelligence – in around March 2001.

Weldon testified this morning that two weeks ago, at an informal briefing to House members, a Pentagon lawyer said that there had been no need to get special clearance to destroy Able Danger materials because they were open-source, not classified. Now, the Pentagon is blocking the Senate from conducting its oversight function by claiming it is worried about disclosure of classified information – even to the point of declining to allow witnesses to testify in closed session.

Finally, Weldon repeated today that he told then-Deputy National Security Adviser (now NSA) Steve Hadley about Able Danger and gave him a chart with Atta on it right after the 9/11 attacks. He added today that Rep. Dan Burton came with him to see Hadley on that occasion. He also reported that Hadley conceded to him, in a conversation about 3 months ago, that he recalled Weldon providing the chart. Yet, we have still not heard a word from Hadley – who could have put a lot of these claims and counter-claims about the credibility of the witnesses to rest weeks ago by simply confirming or denying Weldon’s version of events.

This is all very strange, and the business about Rice and Perry coming up in the data mining for Chinese spying does not come close to explaining it away. Plus, to keep our eye on the ball for a second here, it’s very likely we had Atta identified long before 9/11 – a fact of enormous significance.