Three More Remember ID'ing Mohammad Atta

Drip, drip, drip.

A Defense Department inquiry has found three more people who recall seeing an intelligence briefing slide that identified the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks a year before the hijackings and terrorist strikes, Pentagon and military officials said Thursday.

But the officials said investigators who reviewed thousands of documents and electronic files from a secret counterterrorism planning unit had not found the chart itself, or any evidence the chart ever existed.

The officials acknowledged that documents and electronic files created by the unit, known as Able Danger, were destroyed under standing orders that limit the military's use of intelligence gathered about people in the United States.

At a Pentagon briefing on Thursday, four intelligence or military officials said investigators had interviewed 80 people who served directly with Able Danger, a team organized to write a counterterrorism campaign plan, or were closely associated with it.

Of those 80, 5 in all now say they saw the chart, including Capt. Scott J. Phillpott of the Navy and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of the Army, whose recent comments first brought attention to Able Danger.

Anyone want to bet this turns out to be not quite true?

Another official who described the inquiry, Cmdr. Christopher Chope of the United States Special Operations Command, said there was no evidence that the destruction of Able Danger documents had been anything other than a routine application of privacy regulations.

We'll see.