Atta and the other three 9/11 terrorists who showed up on the Able Danger chart were NOT U.S. citizens. So information about them need not have, and should not have, been destroyed.
I don't know the immigration status of the other fifty-odd persons who were fingered by Able Danger, but that is yet another mystery we need to clear up.
William Dugan Acting Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight Department of Defense explained yesterday in the hearing:
"The purpose of the Intelligence Oversight program is to enable DoD intelligence components to effectively carry out their authorized functions, while at the same time ensuring their activities that affect United States persons are carried out in a manner that protects their Constitutional rights and privacy.
I’ve used the term “United States persons.” It is an important one because it refers to more than just United States citizens. The term also includes lawful permanent residents, corporations incorporated in the United States (unless directed or controlled by a foreign government), and unincorporated associations substantially composed of lawful permanent residents and/or U.S. citizens."
Just so you know the (tortured) reasoning of the Pentagon on why they had to destroy Able Danger documentation.
"Atta and the other three 9/11 terrorists who showed up on the Able Danger chart were NOT U.S. citizens. So information about them need not have, and should not have, been destroyed."
Look. Atta and perhaps ten thousand other individuals where buried within the raw data received and masaged using the various set of software tools described in many articles posted at FR in the past month. Weldon continues to make it clear as well as colonel Shaffer, Captain Phspot etc., that they had no idea who Atta was. His entity (by name) and linked to a photograph supplied by a unnamed source from California (someone working on seeing who attended what mosques etc), showed up in textual/graphical reports printed and of course shown on the NT Systems screen. They had no idea who he was. They where experimenting with these new software tools for the most part for reasons not complety made clear. Probably just evaluating their capabilities. Their mission clearly did not include doing investigative work on any individual in the way a crime investigative team , say at the FBI would handle the data. At some point AD team members made contact with the FBI after feeling Atta and his cohorts who where linked with him in the associated data, hierarchical as well as relational, somehow appeared to be associated with a known NY Brooklyn terrorist cell.
This conclusion was stumbled upon, due to the nature of how they messaged the data, and a warning lite went off that perhaps these guys should have been checked out by the FBI.
OK. Now with that very abbreviated history. Within the scope of their project, it was decided to cancel the program or as it appears, move elements of the project fully into the contractors's domain. That is stop the Army folk from working on the project while on DIA property. In the process the DIA rules indicated the project data should be destroyed within 90 days of the project being shut down. We have no idea as to how many US citizens, governement employees as well as plain citizens may have been single out in that projects activities. But clearly, the DoD acting within the spirit of the Gorelick memos decided they may get in trouble for spying on US citizens so they ordered the data to be destroyed and close the project down. Clearly at that time as Weldon and other have tried to stress over and over again. The info on Atta in the form it took probably would not have gone anywhere. If by chance the FBI had been allowed to find him, if they could, and question him, remember he had a valid visa at the time, they would not have held him on anything. No charges where (remember Clintoon's philosophy, treat terrorist like criminals, which means you have to wait until after they pull something off, to charge them), would have come forth. Atta and his gang would just move about for another few months and had carried out their mission. But I am digressing. In that period of time Atta was only a name in a database structure of some sort. The DoD asked for the whole database structure(s) to be destroyed that may have contained literally thousands of US citizens names and attributes. Atta was just some data record at best if one views it in a relational database type form (a tuple, or record within a table).
So with this rather verbose description, I would ask anyone.
How could this team at the time known that Atta's data should have somehow been saved into some privately held database structure in a way that would have any meaning to anyone, and then destroy the rest of the data. The total byte size (from a raw data viewpoint stored on say a hard disk) may have only amounted to a few megabytes, of course including the digitized photo of him). He was not suspect of anything within the bounds of that project. Right? He was one of thousands or more entities within the raw data that popped up while doing various type search algorithms.
So this whole issue has gotten out of hand in my opinion in regards to the destruction of the data, and closing down the project. 9/11 would have taken place regardless if the project continued and every byte of data was intack to this day in some NT/2000 server or not. And chances are Bill Clinton had no idea the DIA unit called Able Danger even existed. Don't you folks realize there are dozen of like projects that go on within the DoD very few people have a need to know about. Why would Hillary the Beast or Billy Boy know about this particular project? Think about it. As for Sandy the Burgler. Why would he know about it. Just because one is the National Security Advisor to the POTUS does not mean they spend their time viewing detailed and often classified flow charts of just what unit does what within the framework of each of the hundreds of DoD sub units.
Same thing goes with Richard Clark, who has not been mentioned much in this discussion on Able Danger. I bet you a dime none of the above mentioned knew about Able Danger, as was the case with many high ranking DoD and even DIA generals and downward. They had no need to know. That is the way the system works.