SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 13 — The modern task of successfully destroying electronic documents has become daunting enough to give Oliver North nightmares. Mr. North is the Marine officer who became notorious during the Reagan-era Iran-contra scandal after it was discovered he had tried to delete thousands of e-mail messages, only to discover that they had been retained on backup tapes and made available to Congressional investigators. The issue of the destruction and possible retrieval of electronic data burst into the news last week after Arthur Andersen & Company, the auditors for the Enron Corporation (news/quote), said that the accounting firm had destroyed a "significant but undetermined" number of documents relating to Enron and its finances. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/14/technology/ebusiness/14DELE.html