Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11?

For your information - - Happy Monday.

foreignpolicy.com...

The NSA knew about Mihdhar’s connection to bin Laden and had earlier linked his name with the operations center.

Had they known he was now reaching out to bin Laden’s switchboard from a U.S. number, on the day an al Qaeda-linked assassination plot was planned, the agency could have legally obtained an order to tap the San Diego phone line.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in fact, approves eavesdropping on suspected terrorists and spies in the United States. By monitoring Mihdhar’s domestic calls, the agency certainly would have discovered links to the 9/11 hijackers living on the East Coast, including Mohamed Atta.

It’s likely, in other words, that 9/11 would have been stopped in its tracks.

This is supposedly the rationale for NSA's intercepts of phone metadata and ??? According to the story, that just isn't so....

During a private lunch in Washington, former NSA Senior Executive Service member William Binney, who was in charge of automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping operations, detailed how interception worked.

“When you have a [cast-iron] number like that, it’s tasked at multiple sites, so any call coming into or out is hit by multiple sites and recorded, first of all, but also transcribed as soon as [NSA analysts] have a transcriber available,” Binney said. The signal “could go by satellite or cable, or a mix,” he said, adding that the cooperating phone companies then “would pop it right into our recorders.”

When Drake heard Hayden’s denial that the NSA had the technical capability to determine that Mihdhar was calling from San Diego, he completely disagreed.

“Not true. That’s an absolute lie,” he said. “Every number that comes into that switchboard, if you’re cast-iron coverage on that switchboard, you know exactly what that number is and where it comes from.… You know exactly—otherwise it can’t get there.”

Confirmation of what Drake uncovered comes from Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden desk at the CIA prior to 9/11.

He knew the NSA had succeeded in developing cast-iron coverage of the al Qaeda operations center in Yemen, but that it refused to share the raw intelligence with his agency.

“Inmarsat calls were very important,” he said, “and we knew that because NSA had told us … not only [in] the run-up to 9/11, but to the attacks in East Africa [in 1998] and other places.”

In an agency filled with secrets, the NSA’s failure to detect the 9/11 plot or help other agencies do so is probably its deepest and darkest. For years, rather than reveal the true nature of the blunder, the agency has instead propagated the fable that it missed that San Diego call in 2000 for technical reasons. Consequently, the Bush and Obama administrations conducted what amounted to ironclad surveillance of Americans’ phone activity for more than a decade.

Yes.

More to add to the pile. These men in control are sick.

It's easy to look back and see where we could have stopped any event in history.
It's much harder to connect all the random dots and prevent something.

Lets not forget that back then the CIA - FBI - NSA did not share intel.
Each had a piece or two of the puzzle. But not enough to connect the dots.

a reply to: FyreByrd
My impression is that Bin Laden had nothing to do with 911 except to take the blame.

a reply to: Kromlech

When the world trade center towers were first discussed we knew they were planned obsolescence.
One solution was to take the towers down slowly with a crane the way they were put up.
Another "limited funds" proposal called for a faster implosion solution.

No way of knowing when Bush was briefed about the PO, he might have actually believed they were going to slowly disassemble the towers with roof cranes.

That is the reason it is difficult to weigh in and pass judgement on individuals involved in the 911 project.

a reply to: wastedown

More to add to the pile. These men in control are sick.

Misguided and misinformed is a better term.
Example:
In my own community TPTB decided to add a bicycle lane down town.
Somewhere somehow they were talked into changing a three lane (one direction) road and dorking it up.
It used to have the right lane for parking and the other two for driving into town. Logical.
They changed it to right lane for bicycles and center lane for driving or parking.
That's right you now have parked cars in the center lane. They spent $750,000 of tax payers money repainting and resigning the roads only to have a dramatic increase in traffic accidents.
Misguided idiots in city hall.

Examples like this show that government cannot execute a demolition and cover up like 911.
Where did I hear it? Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

They want the NSA spying to remain consent, whether it was an intentional stand down or not, of course this would be said as fact. If it was staged to happen, NSA would not matter at all in that case, unless it could have been used to push these anti privacy campaigns.

The NSA and the rest have been trying to deflect blame from themselves for years now.It's the basis of the "incompetence theory." no one could connect the dots due to turf wars and compartmentalization and other bureaucratic screw ups.But the more you look at it the more you begin to realize there was far too much going on to just chalk up to incompetence and turf wars.