– A DoD employee will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 21 September that in 2000 civilian superiors ordered him to destroy a huge cache of data from the Able Danger unit on potential terrorists or he would lose his job or go to jail, Rep. Curt Weldon said, Congressional Quarterly reported on 8 September.

It should be interesting. I had the opportunity to listen to Curt Weldon. He impressed me not as the usual Congressman on the make. But a person who cares deeply and passionately about the fate of the country. This story is important not to our past but for our future.

The witness, who Weldon did not name, is to testify he was ordered to destroy 2.5 terabytes of data related to Able Danger and al-Qa’ida. "What were their motives? I think we have to find out," Weldon said.
Five people who were connected to Able Danger have said the program identified Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, as a potential threat more than a year earlier. Weldon and some of these people have also said DoD did not share with the FBI what it learned about al-Qa’ida prior to 9/11 as a result of Able Danger.
DoD officials acknowledged at a 2 September briefing that they destroyed the data. They said it was done as a matter of routine to protect the identity of U.S. persons.
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, an MI officer who worked on the program, has said he briefed senior officials in DoD and the White House on ways to excise U.S. persons' names without losing the entire database. DoD, Shaffer said, must have obliterated the data for another reason that it is not disclosing. (DKR)