Claim Atta Was Named Debated

Shaffer has conceded that he based his recollection on the memories of others, and the Pentagon says he had contact with the now defunct 18-month project for a total of 27 days. Shaffer's security clearance was formally revoked on Monday for a series of unrelated violations, including allegations that he exaggerated his past actions to obtain a service medal, according to his attorney, Mark S. Zaid.

Shaffer denies the allegations and was entitled to the medal, Zaid said yesterday.

The Bush administration has fueled the controversy through its responses to various allegations. For example, the Pentagon provided an on-the-record briefing about the issue to reporters earlier this month, but then refused to allow public testimony by Philpott and others at Wednesday's Senate committee hearing. The Pentagon has relented and will allow the witnesses to testify at a second hearing Oct. 5, the judiciary panel announced yesterday.

Weldon has alleged that documents proving his claims may have been lost as part of a record-destruction program motivated by concerns over keeping data on U.S. citizens, companies and legal residents. Yet large volumes of Able Danger documents did survive, presumably including the Atta charts that Weldon and others claim to have had in their possession as recently as last year. Weldon has also said he used original data from the Able Danger project to reconstruct charts that he has presented to reporters and to Congress.

In his unusual appearance before the judiciary panel Wednesday, Weldon criticized the Pentagon investigation and said Defense Department officials were stonewalling. "My goal now . . . is the same as it was then: the full and complete truth about the run-up to 9/11," Weldon said.

Weldon is a controversial figure who is vice chairman of the House homeland security and armed services committees and is known for carrying a replica of a suitcase nuclear bomb. His book, which devoted one paragraph to the claim about Atta, focused primarily on allegations by an Iranian intelligence source whom the CIA has dismissed as a fabricator.

The chart that Weldon said he gave to Hadley was one of the enduring mysteries of the controversy. Two others associated with Able Danger, Shaffer and defense contractor James D. Smith, also have said in interviews that they had copies of a pre-Sept. 11 chart that included Atta, but that they were destroyed in 2004 under unclear circumstances.

Zaid, who represents both Shaffer and Smith, said Smith's copy was thrown away after it was wrecked while it was being removed from an office wall. Shaffer has said that his copy was among papers destroyed by the Defense Intelligence Agency last year when his clearance was first suspended.

While Pentagon investigators never found such a chart, they did uncover two other interesting diagrams: One from 1999 included the name and photograph of Mohammed Atef -- not Atta -- a well-known al Qaeda lieutenant. Another included the photo of a convicted terrorist named Eyad Ismoil, an Egyptian who bears a resemblance to Atta -- and who, unlike Atta, was part of the Brooklyn cell tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Investigators and experts say those two charts could explain how a handful of military officers and civilians may have come to mistakenly believe they identified Atta. Atta's Florida driver's license photo from the summer of 2000 has become an icon of the attacks, and the lead hijacker has been the subject of many dubious claims and sightings.

"No evidence turns up to corroborate what people think they saw," former senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), a member of the Sept. 11 commission, wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. ". . . Any investigator can tell you that memories, years after the fact, are faulty."