Missed Calls: Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11? (James Bamford)

[Octafish]

Missed Calls:

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

James Bamford
Foreign Policy, July 21, 2015

March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper.

The same day that Clinton was supposed to visit Joypura, the phone rang at bin Laden’s operations center in Sanaa, Yemen. To counterterrorism specialists at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland, the Yemeni number—967-1-200-578—was at the pinnacle of their target list. They monitored the line 24/7. But at the time, the agency now claims, it had no technical way of knowing who was placing the call. The culprit, it would later be revealed, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the men bin Laden had picked months earlier to lead the forthcoming 9/11 attacks. He was calling from his apartment in San Diego, California.

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.

A decade and a half later, that call and half a dozen others made from the San Diego apartment are at the center of the heated debate over the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities—namely the agency’s collection of the public’s telephone metadata, which George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations have claimed was authorized by the 2001 Patriot Act. (That law expired this June and was replaced with the USA Freedom Act, which states that, without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the NSA will no longer have access to telephone metadata records.)

CONTINUED...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/21/missed-calls-nsa-terrorism-osama-bin-laden-mihdhar/

Thanks, Bush.

[Hydra]

1. Playing stupid to cover their role in it and to expand their powers

How does that work, exactly? "We fucked up, but it's because we didn't have (even more) boundless overreaching authority. You need to give us that so it won't happen again."

[Octafish]

3. So now they can do what Frank Church and Hannah Arendt warned us about.

The Fall Guys at the CIA

Amor Mundi
The Hannah Arendt Center

Fritz Schwarz, who once served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate's Church Committee's investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies under six presidents--Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon--argues that the Senate's recently released torture report made a mistake in placing all the blame on the CIA. &quot P)lacing blame almost exclusively on the CIA is neither accurate nor fair. The Church Committee initially risked going down the same path in its investigation of CIA assassination plots. Senator Frank Church speculated to the press that the CIA may have acted like a 'rogue elephant on a rampage.' Other senators, also speculating, opined the CIA 'took orders from the top.' But, after extensive investigation and when the committee released its Interim Report on Assassinations, it declined to adopt either theory. Instead, the Church Committee presented substantial evidence for both views, saying the conflicting evidence made it impossible to be certain whether or not Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy authorized the assassination plots. Then, in its final reports issued six months later, based on facts from six administrations and review of many more programs and many more agencies, the Church Committee was ready to fix responsibility at the top. Yes, some agency programs were concealed from higher authority, but more frequently it was senior officials themselves who through pressure for results created a climate for abuse, failed to assure compliance with the law, and demanded action without carefully providing for future oversight. In the case of torture, the Bush-Cheney White House was clearly involved. It pushed for and approved the program; it was complicit in obtaining the deeply flawed legal opinions that redefined the ban on torture to meaningless nothings. White House officials forgot that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln barred torture in perilous times when Americans were hard pressed in their fight to create the nation or to save it. They also forgot that after World War II the United States led the way in drafting the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture and other forms of inhumane treatment. They locked out voices of experience from the State Department and the military who would have warned of harm to America's reputation and risks to American captives. They failed to listen to FBI experts on interrogation who could have explained we were getting important intelligence through interrogation techniques other than torture. And they forgot, or nobody told them, that after World War II we had prosecuted Japanese officials as war criminals for using on American soldiers the same torture techniques the White House authorized and the CIA implemented after 9/11." Schwarz's Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy will appear this year, and Schwarz himself will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center's 2015 fall conference on privacy.

SOURCE: http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=15114

Good thing for DU, Hydra. Some people are aware of what the tee vee isn't telling.

[Hydra]

4. That's the main reason I'm here

The TeePee was telling me things that didn't square with what I was seeing. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

And the torture thing is possibly the most horrid thing that has happened so far- it was not an attempt to get information, it was an attempt to legalize what they were already doing. You could argue that the entire GWB presidency was the dark side of the Gov't coming out of the closet and demanding to be accepted by everyone. The Obama Admin, in contrast, has been about hiding it again but making it leaner, meaner and tougher than it was before.

A lot of people want to believe Hannah Arendt was wrong, but look at how many people support the move to torture?

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Funny that you should mention her

re-reading her work... I am working on something that might become a series of long articles.

[Hydra]

10. I encourage you to do so

Her works, the Nuremberg Trials, the Stanford experiment and the Milgram experiment had a profound effect on how I understand the malleable nature of humans, and just how easy it is to jump off the slippery slope it is if everyone is being quiet.

[leveymg]

24. But, you know, CIA was designed to be the "fall guy" for Presidential covert activities. Plausible

deniability for the CIC when operations go bad. It's right there in the Charter. This one went very, very bad.

Obviously, this operation was interagency and international. Tenet said there were half a dozen allied agencies monitoring the late December 1999 Kuala Lumpur AQ planning summit attended by al-Midhar, al-Hazmi, and several other named co-conspirators at which the 9/11 and USS Cole attacks were mapped out.

Again, we get the wholely implausible story that US intelligence was unable to get a microphone or video camera inside (or to read the window vibrations) of the golf course condominium where these known al-Qaeda operatives met, despite having at least 10 days advance notice when al-Midhar "phoned home."

We already knew that immediately after their arrival at LAX in early January, the Flt. 77 hijackers met an official of Saudi Consulate in LA operating under cover as an employee of Dallah AVCO, who gave them funds from an account at Riggs Bank operated by the wife of Ambassador before passing them over to Anwar al-Awlaki, the Iman of the Saudi-supported San Diego Islamic Center. Al-Awlaki was in frequent contact as one and then both met with the other hijackers during the months that followed.

[Octafish]

27. President Truman didn't expect the cloak and dagger stuff when he signed it into law.

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11

EXCERPT...

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

CONTINUED...

SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

That was published one month after the assassination of President Kennedy. President Truman made clear his concern CIA had strayed off the reservation from intelligence gathering of foreign news sources to cloak-and-dagger operations. Time -- and the Church and Pike committees -- have since shown CIA operated, illegally, domestically and who knows where and how else.

PS: Thank you for the detailed information, leveymg. I wish you were publisher of The New York Times and owned CNN.

[rhett o rick]

33. Maybe in the day when the CIA answered to the President. Today, I believe it's the other way

around.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Well they were just slapped back

bad, bad NSA... so of course they need to justify ECHELLON 4.0

(Oh high guys, I know this will trip your dictionary, ever heard of the 4th amendment? )

[leveymg]

2. "They had no technical means of tracing the call" !!!!!!!!

Last edited Sat Sep 12, 2015, 08:53 AM - Edit history (1)

This contradicts the Joint Intel Report of 2003 that claimed nothing was heard from al-Midhar and l-HAzmi after the CIA "lost track" of them in Bangkok after they left an Al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur in late December 1999.

Now, 15 years later, the truth is finally coming out. The Fly 77 hijackers were known and tracked all along as they travelled across America meeting with AQ co-conspirators including the other 9/11 hijackers and Anwar Alwaki, a double-agent.

[Octafish]

9. Looks like a Fortress of Turpitude

The formerly Top Secret record supports what the whistleblowers have reported.

The NSA’s 9/11 Cover-Up: General Hayden Told a Lie, and It’s a Whopper

by Bill Blunden
CounterPunch, July 30, 2015

EXCERPT...

James Bamford, himself a former NSA whistleblower, digs into Hayden’s assertions. Leveraging the technical expertise of former NSA insiders he unearths an unsettling find. The narrative spun by Hayden is “an absolute lie.” The NSA knew damn well that these calls were coming from San Diego. According to former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake:

“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.”

Former NSA senior analyst Kirk Wiebe expounds on Drake’s counterpoint, noting that telephone communiques are bundled with the bits of information necessary to bill the correct phone company:

“You know the phone numbers involved, who’s making the phone call, and who it’s going to because the billing system has to have that metadata to charge you.”

So Drake, Wiebe, and other NSA veterans charge that Hayden is full of it. That the NSA was aware of terrorists in San Diego phoning home to Yemen. This raises some important questions. For example, how on earth could an intelligence agency with billions in resources neglect to follow up on these calls? From people whom they knew to be associated with bin Laden? How could internal security services not request court authorization for wiretaps and launch an inquiry? It’s a given that any investigator worth their salt would’ve linked and correlated the San Diego callers to other 9/11 terrorists in the United States and almost certainly put a halt to the operation.

There may be those who point to incompetence and embarrassment as a possible explanation. Such people would argue that the NSA is an agency like other agencies made up of people and that people are fallible; the San Diego call was somehow overlooked or was accidentally lost in the commotion of the NSA’s monolithic bureaucracy.

Your author questions this account, as it would indicate an organization that’s way beyond dysfunctional. Recent disclosures by WikiLeaks describe economic espionage by the United States which depict an NSA that’s more than capable of performing SIGINT missions. Other Snowden-era documents also indicate that the NSA runs a world class spy outfit. Consider also that foreign countries like Germany are just itching to be brought into the Five Eyes fold. No keystone cops here, no sir!

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/30/the-nsas-911-cover-up-general-hayden-told-a-lie-and-its-a-whopper/

Seeing this story confirming our worst fears from 14 years ago is most troubling.

[leveymg]

22. There were at least 2 Saudi double-agents together in San Diego: al-Midhar and Alwaki

and we're supposed to believe the NSA had no way to monitor their communications at this end?

Why don't they just come out and admit it. This was a Saudi intelligence operation running inside the U.S. with the knowledge of CIA (but without adequate controls) that was, itself, compromised by AQ doubles. The plans to attack the US were well known. The FBI was called off because that would have interfered with what was treated as a Top Secret Compartmentalized program. Would the US public really be THAT shocked to learn this obvious explanation for what happened?

[Octafish]

69. DU has no clue how lucky we are.

Same for the USA: leveymg spells out what the nation's press corpse is afraid to touch, the truth about Bush and 9-11:

Director Mueller: 9/11 Hijackers were, in Fact, Under NSA Surveillance

by leveymg
Daily Kos, FRI JUN 14, 2013

NSA Surveillance of 9/11 Plot Was Known to FBI

Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller made a startling claim yesterday to a Congressional Committee overseeing the NSA inquiry. The Director described how Khalid al-Midhar, one of the 9-11 hijackers, had called a Yemeni safe house from a phone in San Diego shortly before the attack. Mueller claims had today's surveillance system been in place, NSA surveillance of that call would have led to sharing of intelligence with the FBI and "derailed" the 9/11 attack. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/13/fbi-mueller-spy-tactics-9-11-boston

That isn't the complete truth, however. Court records from the trial of convicted co-conspiractor Zakaria Moussaoui shows the FBI was aware of NSA intercepts of Midhar and and his partner Nawaf al-Hazmi in the months leading up to 9/11, who went on to hijack Flt. 77 that slammed into the Pentagon. The pair had also met with the other principal 9/11 hijackers at various locations inside the US. Based in part on NSA wiretaps that were later withheld and suppressed, FBI agents had, in fact, located the pair inside the US in mid-2001, but the investigating agents were ordered to close the file after CIA refused to cooperate and pressured the Bureau to shut down several lines of field investigation that were focusing on the plotters.

Mueller's claims omit those key facts. The Director instead stated that Khalid al-Mihdhar was being monitored by intelligence agencies, but “they lost track of him,” Mueller said. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2013/0613/Secret-NSA-program-could-have-derailed-9-11-attacks-FBI-director-says-video

FBI Director Mueller doesn't explain why. He instead told Congress that intelligence officials did not know that it was Midhar who called a Yemen safehouse to discuss progress of the plot. The NSA monitoring program could have changed that, Mueller argued, potentially leading to the "derailing" of the plot. In fact, the FBI field investigators had already tried to get CIA to reveal the NSA surveillance records they knew already existed, but that line of investigation was shut down by headquarters. Mueller's statement is completely misleading in view of the actual events and decisions taken by ranking intelligence officials to sidetrack ongoing FBI investigations into the al-Qaeda operation during 2001:

“If we had the telephone number from Yemen, we would have matched it up to that telephone number in San Diego, got further legal process, identified al-Mihdhar,” he said. “The 9/11 Commission itself indicated that investigations or interrogations of al-Mihdhar once he was identified could have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot.”

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/14/1216187/-Director-Mueller-9-11-Hijackers-were-in-Fact-Under-NSA-Surveillance

Thank you for all you do to keep us informed, leveymg. You do what the nation's media fail to do: Map out the Territory and Connect the Dots.

[leveymg]

70. Back at you. Thank you, this would otherwise be a dark blind alley of smoke and mirrors.

Please let me know what you think of this one: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=592914

[leveymg]

23. Here's the inside story from the FBI liaison at CIA CTC. This has some new info, below

http://28pages.org/2015/09/11/former-fbi-agent-mark-rossini-driven-to-expose-cias-911-secret/

Former FBI Agent Mark Rossini Driven to Expose CIA’s 9/11 Secret
September 11, 2015 editor28pages 28 pages, 9/11, CIA, Khalid al Midhar, Mark Rossini

In 2000, then-FBI agent Mark Rossini was a witness to perhaps the most disastrous and consequential incident in the history of the U.S. intelligence community—one he believes is ultimately the only reason why al Qaeda was able to kill 2,977 people on September 11, 2001 and unleash a chain of worldwide aftershocks that continue to this day.

Rossini told 28Pages.org about the CIA’s intentional obstruction of a warning about a future 9/11 hijacker, and the agency secret that he thinks lies behind it.

By Brian P. McGlinchey
Former FBI Agent Mark Rossini
Mark Rossini

In January 2000, Mark Rossini and Doug Miller were FBI agents with an unusual assignment: They worked in the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, code-named “Alec Station.”

That month, the CIA learned that known Al Qaeda terrorist Khalid al-Midhar—who had been linked to a pair of devastating attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and who had just attended a terrorist summit in Malaysia—had obtained a multi-entry visa enabling him to travel to the United States.

To alert his FBI superiors that a known “bad actor” was now equipped to travel to the homeland—the FBI’s jurisdiction—Miller dutifully drafted a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR. To the astonishment of Miller and Rossini, however, the message was stopped in its tracks.

A CIA supervisor, responding via the computer system that managed the flow of CIRs, wrote: “pls hold off for on CIR per Tom Wilshire.” Wilshire was Alec Station’s deputy chief.

Bewildered and alarmed, given what was at stake, Miller turned to Rossini who, as the senior of the two, took it upon himself to follow up with the supervisor. In his interview with 28Pages.org, Rossini would not name this person—whose name is still considered classified—and instead referred to her using the pseudonym “Michelle.” Elsewhere, however, it’s been reported that the CIA supervisor was a woman named Michael Anne Casey.

In a heated exchange, Rossini says Casey told him, “You are not to tell the FBI about it. When and if we want the FBI to know about it, we will.”

Had the FBI been alerted, Rossini says, “(FBI counter-terror chief) John O’Neill would have assembled a whole team to come to the agency and demanded a meeting and ask how do you know about this information, why do you know about this information, and for how long?”

The questions would have been followed by decisive action. “If they come here, we’re going to follow them and put them on every watch list, put them in a computer system, tickler the NSA because the NSA monitors all their travel and tickets and everything. They’re coming to America? Great. We’ll have people there that day to follow them in America,” he says. Given such scrutiny, it seems likely the broader plot could have been detected and foiled.

But because of Wilshire’s directive and its enforcement by Casey, none of that happened. Instead, on September 11, al-Midhar helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon and killed 64 people on the aircraft and 125 on the ground.

The CIA incident—and the thought of what would have happened if he or Doug had disobeyed the order—has weighed heavily on Rossini ever since.

Today, Rossini is a man on a mission—a mission to expose what he believes was an illegal CIA operation that was the reason for the agency’s interference: “I’m trying to prove circumstantially, for the rest of my life, there was a recruitment op that went bad.”

Rossini is convinced that the CIA, in an effort to get more information on al Qaeda, was trying to recruit al-Midhar or, less likely, his close associate, Nawaf al-Hazmi—in other words, to turn one or both of them into a source that would share the terror organization’s secrets. Doing so on U.S. soil without consulting the FBI is prohibited. Bush counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who was also kept in the dark, embraces the same theory.

More Suspicious Behavior…and a Cover-Up

According to a revealing 2011 story by Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski in Salon, although Casey prevented Miller and Rossini from alerting the FBI, she sent out a message—or cable, in CIA parlance—to others in the CIA saying the FBI had been notified. And she sent that message two days before the heated conversation with Rossini.

Casey’s supervisor, identified by O’Connor and Nowosielski as Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, would later tell investigators working for the 2002 joint congressional intelligence inquiry into 9/11 that she had personally delivered al-Midhar’s visa information to FBI headquarters, a statement proven false when the investigators checked the FBI visitor log.

That congressional inquiry, a precursor to the 9/11 Commission, is the same one that produced the famously classified, 28-page chapter documenting foreign government ties to 9/11.

CIA logoRossini says that, before the inquiry’s investigators arrived, the word was put out: “You’re not to talk about anything going on here. Those (joint inquiry investigators) are not cleared to know about the operations going on here, so just keep your mouth shut. No one said ‘lie,’ but it was put in my head that they’re after somebody to put in jail. And I wasn’t allowed to have an attorney present,” says Rossini.

While Rossini didn’t have an attorney, someone else was present in the interview: A CIA monitor, taking notes. “Every question I was asked, she would just look at me in the eye and stare at me while I talked,” says Rossini, whose repeated responses of “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” made for a very brief discussion: “Maybe 15 minutes at most.”

Looking back now and asked to characterize the CIA’s approach to the joint inquiry, Rossini replies, “Obstruction. And fear. An assurance that questions would just hit roadblocks.” Those roadblocks were so effective that the 9/11 Commission skipped Miller and Rossini altogether.

It wasn’t until the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) conducted its own 9/11 inquiries—with an assurance that participants needn’t worry about being prosecuted, found civilly liable or losing their jobs—that Rossini finally felt comfortable fully exposing the CIA’s stifling of the warning about al-Midhar.

The OPR interviews took place in a conference room filled with executives and staff members. “We came in one by one, and you sat at the end of the table. It was like a Senate hearing and they peppered you with questions.” Rossini was near one of seven audio recorders arrayed around the table. The FBI’s assistant director of OPR, Candice Will, was seated next to him.

Then came the question he yearned to answer: “Mark, why do you think Doug’s memo didn’t go?”

“I can be a little cheeky,” says Rossini. “I tapped the recorder and looked at Candice Will in the eye and said, ‘This thing on?’ She smiled and said ‘yes’ and I said, ‘Well, let me tell you a little story…'”
The Unasked, Unanswered Question: “Why Did You Write That?”

Though Rossini has told his story, what’s missing, he says, is the rationale behind the message that halted Miller’s CIR: “pls hold off for now on CIR per Tom Wilshire.”

“No one’s ever drilled down on the person who wrote it and found out why. Not to my knowledge. The 9/11 Commission certainly didn’t do it,” says Rossini. “We need to know why she wrote that, and why (Tom Wilshire) told her to tell that to Doug. And what was said between those two people. The answer to that is the reason 9/11 happened. No other issue. No other thing.”

“Tell me why. Why you hold off on sending a CIR to the FBI that evil people that you took the time and effort to follow halfway around the globe, you hold off on telling the bureau that they have visas to come to the USA. There’s no logical reason. None, other than they wanted to recruit somebody or try to and they didn’t want the FBI in the form of John O’Neill messing up their operation and they didn’t want the FBI to cause embarrassment to the Saudi regime.”

Saudi FlagRossini said that, to protect Saudi Arabia from embarrassment, the CIA and its Saudi Arabian counterparts had something of a gentleman’s agreement—one that can help explain why the CIA wouldn’t want the FBI to know a prominent al-Qaeda member was poised to travel to the United States.

“(Former CIA officer) Bruce Reidel says that, essentially, the U.S. government had an agreement with the Saudi GID—the General Intelligence Directorate, their version of a combined FBI/CIA—that if and when we identify wayward Saudis around the globe, boys that had lost their moral compass, if you will, rather than embarrassing the regime and arresting them with big splashy headlines like we’re prone to do, we would get them back home to be reprogrammed. Or—we use the term in the FBI—‘rechromed,”’ said Rossini. “If you screw up in the FBI, they’ll send you to headquarters for two years to be rechromed, and you come out like a fresh new Cadillac.”

The kingdom’s extreme fear of embarrassment—which Rossini says flows from its self-perceived position as the promoter of pure Islam and the keeper of the religion’s two holiest sites—obstructed the FBI before, in the wake of the 1996 bombing of a housing complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemembers.
The Devastated Khobar Towers
The Devastated Khobar Towers

“This all ties in to Khobar Towers and the FBI trying to go over there and interview the people and the Saudis executed them before they even got a chance to talk to them. Because they don’t want to be embarrassed,” says Rossini. “‘You can’t interview them, they’re dead.'”

“In my opinion, I think the person that was most logically recruited or intended to be recruited was Khalid al-Midhar, for the simple reason that he had a wife and children back in Yemen. Remember, he was allowed to go back home, get a new passport and come back to America,” says Rossini.

Connecting that CIA-GID understanding to his circumstantial case against the CIA, Rossini continued, “So when Khalid al-Midhar was identified, rather than making a big splashy headline, rather than letting my colleague’s memo go to the FBI and have John O’Neill and us go follow him and then maybe arrest him, the CIA said let him be rechromed, let him go back home to Yemen to see his wife, let him go get a new passport. And in that passport they put a chip or a code identifying him as someone who is to be watched.”

Rossini says the CIA’s feelings about O’Neill figured heavily in the agency’s behavior. “They feared John O’Neill being a loose cannon because they hated O’Neill and they feared O’Neill and they thought wrongly of O’Neill. And they feared O’Neill going in and arresting them and embarrassing the Saudis,” he says.
John O'Neill
John P. O’Neill

In a terrible twist, O’Neill was killed on September 11 in New York City, where he served as chief of security for the World Trade Center after leaving the FBI.

The CIA may also have realized they would likely clash on priorities. “The bureau, first of all, would never have given a damn about recruiting them. The first thing the bureau would have done is follow them. And monitor them and get a FISA and then maybe try to recruit them,” says Rossini.

Eventually, the CIA and FBI would talk—to a limited extent. In August of 2001, the CIA had a sudden change of attitude, calling a meeting with the FBI in New York to ask for the bureau’s help in tracking down al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. Notably, Rossini wasn’t invited, and the CIA wouldn’t tell the FBI exactly why they were looking for them.

To Rossini, the shift bolsters the proposition that the CIA had tried to recruit al-Midhar or al-Hazmi—but that something went very wrong.

“What happened in Yemen, when he was there? When he went back home, when he left America. Did someone talk to him, try to speak to him? That’s the thing we need to know. And why was he allowed to come back to America, on July 4th of all days? And then why did the CIA come running up to the FBI and saying ‘you gotta find these guys’? Why? Did Khalid al-Midhar tell them to go pound sand? Did he turn around and say I’m not going to talk to you anymore? Did he stop communicating and they couldn’t find him? That’s really it, that’s what we need to know,” said Rossini.
Footnote 44

Given the history-altering nature of the CIA’s silencing of Miller and Rossini, and the documented dishonesty of CIA supervisors that followed it, one would expect the incident to command an entire chapter within the 9/11 Commission Report—ostensibly a definitive accounting of the attacks and the government’s failure to thwart them. Instead, it’s relegated to a single endnote, buried deep within 116 pages of tiny print in the back of the book.

The 9/11 Commission Report's Full Treatment of the Doug Miller CIR Incident: Footnote 44, Chapter 6

“Mr. Strada is not a footnote and neither is anybody else who died that day,” says Rossini with disgust. “I’m not a footnote, and you’re not a footnote. And to be treated like a footnote is sickening in a government that’s by the people for the people.”

There was a time when, so very fatefully, Mark Rossini was silenced. Today, he is speaking out forcefully and repeatedly, determined to help expose the secret buried somewhere behind footnote #44.

In the coming days, we’ll share more from our in-depth interview with Mark Rossini, including his thoughts on the 28 pages and his pointed answer to the question of whether Iran may have had a hand in 9/11.
REDACTED w911Get involved: Sign the White House petition today

[nationalize the fed]

16. The truth might have come out earlier

Here's a sample of over 5+ years of work done by a pro pilot that was deeply affected by 911- he knew some of the pilots and crew that died. And he knew it could have been him.

Saudi Connection to the 9/11 Hijackers

The hijackers’ training records from several U.S. flight schools indicate that they were marginal pilots, at best, even in single-engine airplanes. In early 2000, three of the pilot/hijackers are heavily documented at a small flight school near Venice, Florida, while the fourth attended schools in Arizona and California. This would account for the basic flight training of the pilots but in no way can explain the expert level of airmanship required for the 911 hit...snip

... So began my search for Middle Eastern operators of Boeing airliners. Because the hijackers were mostly Saudi Arabian, the firm of Dallah Avco, a Saudi operator of multiple private Boeing airliners, soon stood out as a focal point. To my amazement, I immediately discovered that Congressional investigators had already linked Dallah Avco with the actual hijackers. Omar Bayoumi, a Dallah employee and operative within the Saudi Ministry of Aviation, had provided housing and basic support for three hijackers: Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and the pilot/hijacker of American 77, Hani Hanjour.

FBI evidence of the cell would confirm that the hijacking team of American 77 had formed and operated separately with direct financial support from top-level members of the Saudi government, bitter enemies of al Qaeda. The picture was beginning to clear.

One Saudi official in particular, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005, was quickly traced to direct funding of the hijackers, through cashier’s checks, not from him he would say, but from his wife. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, Maine Senator Susan Collins and Florida Senator Bob Graham learned that Saudi officials had directed agents in the United States to assist the future hijackers.snip

http://thebigbamboozle.tumblr.com/post/41340532273/saudi-connection-to-the-911-hijackers

It would be great if the writer could tell his full story- he had documents that led him to a CIA airfield in Arizona called Pinal Airpark- very near where one of the hijackers was attending flight school-- a CIA airport going back to the Vietnam war. Where maybe a thousand or more airplanes sit on the tarmac, waiting to be dismantled for parts- and where jet training could easily be given to anyone, under the radar.

The writer is dead though. It was a "suicide". He supposedly shot himself, his two kids and his dog, right before he was to introduce "blockbuster new evidence" -(his words) of the making of 911.

RIP Philip Marshall. Thanks-We will keep calm and carry on.

Phil's book The Big Bamboozle has 4.3 star rating on Amazon and a used paperback costs $98.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bamboozle-11-War-Terror-ebook/dp/B007NZRLO8/

[Michigan-Arizona]

21. Have you seen this movie

I live about 10 mins. from Pinal Airpark & yes there are tons of large planes there that you can see from the road. In this movie Philip Marshall says the answer to 911 is at the airpark....

[Octafish]

38. Remember Mark Lombardi...

Among the "social networks" NYC artist Mark Lombardi studied was the Bush Family. Lombardi literally drew the connections between the players, events and times. One work connected George W Bush and James Bath to Salem and Osama bin Laden in 2000.


"George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens."

He made dozens of these "Social Network Diagrams," connecting the dots between Bushes and bin Ladens and BCCI and the Mafia and CIA and so on.



Above is a detail from "George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens." Note the Bin Laden -- James R. Bath -- George W. Bush linkage. It was made in 1999. Lombardi was found hanged in his loft in 2000. After 9-11, one NYC gallery reported FBI types came in and inspected his works.

Obsessive—Generous: Toward a Diagram of Mark Lombardi

http://www.whale.to/c/mark_lombard3.html

Lombardi, like the airline pilot, knew how to connect the dots from Poppy Doc Bush and Baby Doc Bush to James R Bath and to Osama bin Laden in 2000.

[Michigan-Arizona]

54. Thank you for all that info.!

One huge crooked bunch they are... Another one that connected all the dots that supposedly committed suicide..... Thank you so very much for all the research you do, it's the absolute best...

[nationalize the fed]

51. Yup

It's too bad it didn't get more exposure.

I live about 10 mins. from Pinal Airpark & yes there are tons of large planes there that you can see from the road. In this movie Philip Marshall says the answer to 911 is at the airpark....

I think Philip Marshall might have had the goods on the perps. Too bad he's dead. His research lives on and everyone interested in what happened that day should read it.

[Michigan-Arizona]

56. I thought it was a good video

I haven't watched it in awhile so maybe it's time to watch it again.... When we go to Phoenix we pass the airpark... Yes I do think Marshall had ALL the good's & I no way believe he killed himself, his children or the dog! I also wonder if whatever he said was at the airpark has been moved since he made that statement open to the public.... Of course you have to have an ID to get into the airpark....

[nationalize the fed]

58. A couple choice quotes

The Reality-Based Community

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove)

PNAC and "A New Pearl Harbor"

”Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor. ...”
From PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" written in September 2000

[riderinthestorm]

52. Can you sum up what he thinks is to be discovered at that airfield?

I dont have a strong enough wifi signal to watch any lengthy videos

[nationalize the fed]

53. From his blog

...Prince Turki and Prince Bandar have more connections to Arabic-speaking Boeing flight instructors than anyone else in the world. The means and opportunity to slip the hijackers into Pinal Airpark or other facilities for training were theirs. The motive was a world-changing event. The Saudis would benefit greatly not only from the targeting of al-Qaeda but from an American invasion of Iraq, one that they had begged for after the first Gulf War. Dick Cheney would guarantee Prince Bandar that America was going to invade Iraq months before anyone informed the United States Congress....snip

At the same time, from several old Iran-Contra sources I began hearing about a hush-hush airport used by the government contractor and mercenary outfit Blackwater, to train covert, special operations flight crews. I soon learned that major flight training had been conducted in the middle of the night with military and civilian airplanes in top-secret fashion. Blackwater is one of several operators that use the very airport I had run across — Pinal Airpark, a secluded desert facility near the town of Marana, Arizona, and near the former home of Saudi Arabian pilot Hani Hanjour, the hijacker pilot of American 77. I discovered that over 80 perfectly airworthy commercial airliners are scattered around the airport and heavily guarded by a mercenary army with covert Saudi ties. The opportunities are perfect to “borrow” a Boeing for unlimited and undocumented air training in the dedicated practice range over the desert. The means and the opportunity to slip hijackers in for training were all in place.

Investigative author Jeremy Scahill had also discovered Pinal and written extensively about it in his 2007 book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He traced Pinal’s four-decade history of clandestine paramilitary activity, from Vietnam and the famous opium cargo outfit dubbed Air America to today’s government contracts in the “War on Terror,” such as the so-called Torture Taxi flights to U.S.-run detention facilities in Afghanistan. Scahill reports that these untraceable contracts govern operation of Blackwater’s fleet of Casa 212 cargo planes that frequent Pinal. He reports that Blackwater’s president Gary Jackson has been bold in bragging that Blackwater’s “black” contracts are so secret, he could not tell one federal agency about Blackwater’s work with another.

“Air Blackwater,” previously known as Aviation Worldwide Services, formed in early 2001, just when the 911 hijackers were in the final stages of training. Public statements said they were to provide “military training operations and aviation transport” for the U.S. government. AWS was then acquired by Blackwater in 2003, as the Iraqi occupation was getting under way. Gary Jackson announced that the new aviation department “complements our strategic goal of providing a ‘one stop’ solution for all of our customer’s security and tactical training needs.” “Tactical training,” of course, raises a red flag. Evergreen International, an aviation company whose board includes the former head of the CIA’s air operations, has taken over management of Pinal while the government doles out no-bid, untraceable “black” contracts to Blackwater, Aero Contractors, International Air Response, Evergreen, SA Incorporated and a host of others...snip
http://thebigbamboozle.tumblr.com/

[riderinthestorm]

57. Blackwater!!

Quelle surprise...

The info about the planes at the airport, their lack of markings, and the training flights makes sense.

I hope I'm still alive when the lid comes off this festering pustule of lies that's grown around 9/11.

Many thanks for this. It's good this info hasn't disappeared completely.

[nationalize the fed]

59. Pinal Airpark on Google Earth

It's well worth a visit.
Coordinates: 32°30?35?N 111°19?31?W

screenshot:


That's just a few of the planes there.

There's even a CIA Black helicopter area next to the main airpark.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinal_Airpark

[riderinthestorm]

60. As an amateur pilot that pic scares the crap out of me!!!

those aren't ultralights and Cessna's (amateur pilot type aircraft). Those are commercial aircraft without a big name flight school associated with a university, corporation like UPS, or the military.

[Michigan-Arizona]

55. I'm not sure

It's been awhile since I watched that video but my guess it must of had something to do with plane part's. I sure wish I knew! In the video it looked like he had stuck something behind a photo in a frame for safe keeping... If I remember right a friend of Philips son came to the house after it was all over & knew there was something in there.... They kind of left it at that & I would love to know where that kid is today & what he knew as well.... I am straight across from that airpark as the crow flies... Once I was going out to hang clothes happen to look over towards my neighbors house & there was a huge plane very low & it had no sound nor any markings, just solid white. If I had not looked up I would never had known it was that close or low..... Hubby said he seen the same thing happen before when he was out in the yard..... Wish I could be more help.....

[Octafish]

37. Heartbreaking. Remember Jim Hatfield...

He wrote that W Bush was so afraid of bin Laden aerial attack, he refused to stay in a hotel on land and slept aboard a U.S. missile destroyer in the harbor.

Here's the story from July 2001:

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?

By James Hatfield

Editor's note: In light of last week's horrific events and the Bush administration's reaction to them, we are reprising the following from the last column Jim Hatfield wrote for Online Journal prior to his tragic death on July 18:

July 3, 2001—There may be fireworks in Genoa, Italy, this month, too.

A plot by Saudi master terrorist, Osama bin Laden, to assassinate Dubya during the July 20 economic summit of world leaders, was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's international terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April.

German intelligence services have stated that bin Laden is covertly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to launch another terrorist attack at a high-profile American target—his first since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October.

According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, the attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives.

Why would Osama bi Laden want to kill, Dubya, his former business partner?

CONTINUED...

http://web.archive.org/web/20060906150015/http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html

FTR: The guy died a few days after this was published. A suicide.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

39. Bush was very good friends with the Saudis

but why would he allow the Saudi government to fund the hijackers?

[riderinthestorm]

41. PNAC. The Bush family needed a Reichstag fire type event to jumpstart war in the ME

under the guise of "strengthening the US militarily".

Read about it and weep...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

[Rosa Luxemburg]

43. I hope this isn't right

Jeremy Corbyn the new UK Labour Party leader has called for Blair to be tried for war crimes. I wish someone would do this to Bush and Cheney.

[Octafish]

47. Buy Partisan defenders in office and out.

Quite powerful supporters in office, too. Part of the permanent neocon-neoliberal left behind network.

Take Ukraine. If they please.

From ISP's RightWeb:

Our woman in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, is married to PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan's brother is Frederick Kagan

Frederick Kagan's spouse is Kimberly Kagan

Brilliant people, big ideas, etc. The thing is, that's a lot of PNAC. And the PNAC approach to international relations means more wars without end for profits without cease, among other things detrimental to democracy, peace and justice.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

49. Reminds me of the English kings plundering other countries and bringing back treasures

I guess history does not change. There's always the powerful and greedy - and the surfs.

[seafan]

18. Senator Bob Graham was on the trail of these guys, but the FBI refused to issue subpoenas.

From some of my documentation from 2012:

Senator Bob Graham sat for an interview with Salon on Sep 8, 2004.

.....

Why do you think the White House is so intent on keeping that information from the public?

I think there are several possible reasons. One is that it did not want the public to be aware of the degree of Saudi involvement in supporting the 9/11 terrorists. Second, it was embarrassing that that support took place literally under the nose of the FBI, to the point where one of the terrorists in San Diego was living at the house of a paid FBI informant. Third, there has been a long-term special relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and that relationship has probably reached a new high under the George W. Bush administration, in part because of the long and close family relationship that the Bushes have had with the Saudi royal family.

In the book, you describe being furious with the FBI for blocking your committee's attempts to interview that paid FBI informant. You write that the panel needed the bureau to deliver a congressional subpoena to the informant because he was in the FBI's protective custody and could not be located without the bureau's cooperation. But the FBI refused to help. What happened? And what do you think the bureau was trying to hide?

We had just finished a hearing and had asked various representatives of the FBI to come into a conference room and discuss our strong interest in being able to interview the San Diego informant. It was clear that the FBI representatives were not going to voluntarily allow that to happen, and we had already prepared a subpoena, which I had in my coat pocket. I walked over to the principal representative for the FBI, Ken Wainstein, and I was approaching him with this subpoena, he clasped his hands tightly behind his back. I tried to hand him the subpoena, but he acted as if it were radioactive. Finally he said he didn't want to take the subpoena, but he would get back to us on the following Monday. Well, nobody ever got back to us. It was the only time in my senatorial experience that the FBI has refused to deliver a legally issued congressional subpoena.

Later, the FBI congressional affairs officer sent a letter to Porter Goss and me, saying, "The administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source, nor did the administration agree to allow the FBI to serve a subpoena on the source." What that tells me is the FBI wasn't acting on its own but had been directed by the White House not to cooperate.
.....

And from September 9, 2011: New evidence links Saudi Arabia to 9/11 hijackers, says Bob Graham

SARASOTA — Weeks after terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, FBI agents swarmed into a Sarasota gated community to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy young Saudi couple who apparently had ties to some of the hijackers.

The couple and their two children abandoned their home abruptly, just a week or so before Sept. 11, leaving behind cars, furniture and food on countertops.

According to one published report, the FBI discovered phone calls between the house and at least two of the hijackers and several other terrorism suspects stretching back a year.

Yet until a Fort Lauderdale website reported the news this week, no mention of the couple has ever appeared publicly — not in the Sept. 11 commission report, nor in FBI briefings to congressional investigators, former Florida Sen. Bob Graham said Friday.

Graham called on President Barack Obama to reopen the case.

.....

Here is some of your related research, leveymg, that should be in this thread as well.


We've got to keep on picking at these evil threads.




Because ** and Cheney still walk free.

[leveymg]

25. Thnx!

[questionseverything]

5. from this important article

It’s a sentiment shared by a host of national leaders, including President Obama. “One of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, made a phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda safe house in Yemen,” he said in a 2014 speech at the Justice Department. “NSA saw that call, but it could not see that the call was coming from an individual already in the United States. The telephone metadata program under Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] was designed to map the communications of terrorists so we can see who they may be in contact with as quickly as possible.”

But according to some former senior NSA officials, the agency did have the technical capability in 2000 to determine that the calls to bin Laden’s operations center came from California. “They’re trying to cover up the failure of the NSA,” said J. Kirk Wiebe, a former senior analyst who worked at the NSA for 32 years, until October 2001. “And I think they’re embarrassed by that.”“They’re trying to cover up the failure of the NSA,” said J. Kirk Wiebe, a former senior analyst who worked at the NSA for 32 years, until October 2001. “And I think they’re embarrassed by that.”

k&r

[Octafish]

34. J Kirk Wiebe - American Hero

Thanks for pointing that out, questionseverything. PBS Frontline told his story. The whistle blower stood up for the Constitution.

I can't post the YouTube right now, but it is dynamite.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-j-kirk-wiebe/

[riderinthestorm]

7. LIHOP at least...

[Hydra]

11. I think there's a word for that...

Just give me a minute...oh, ya...TREASON.

[leveymg]

26. At the very least, 3000 counts of Negligent Homicide. A multi-count indictment.

[Hydra]

28. Bushco is apparently too big to jail

Because their performance during Katrina also counted in a similar category.

[Octafish]

36. NSA docs contradict Bush Administration 9-11 claims

New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims

“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon

By Jordan Michael Smith
Salon.com
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2012 04:24 PM EDT

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

SNIP...

Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has taken credit for the drone program that the Bush administration ignored. “Things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians,” she said in 2006. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.” Rice claimed that the Bush administration continued the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policies, a claim the documents disprove. “If the administration wanted to get it done, I’m sure they could have gotten it done,” says Elias-Sanborn.

Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

CONTINUED w LINKS...

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/

A special prosecutor and federal grand jury eould be in order.

[jfern]

12. "We were too incompetent to do what we could have easily done"

"with available tools because we were so incompetent. So give us all the power."

The FBI knew had the 20th hijacker in custody and knew he wanted to fly a plane into the WTC. Same deal.

[Octafish]

44. Why do they need to spy on us? That's NAZI.

The NSA’s cyber-surveillance technology

Infrastructure of a police state

By Kevin Reed
World Socialist Web Site, 25 June 2013

Edward Snowden’s documentary exposure of secret NSA surveillance activities has brought to light details of the mass illegal collection of phone metadata and online transaction activity of both US citizens and individuals, organizations and governments around the world.

Following a classified Congressional intelligence briefing on June 11, US Representative Loretta Sanchez stated in a C-Span interview that Snowden’s disclosures were “the tip of the iceberg.” Indeed, with more revelations to come, Edward Snowden has courageously helped make the public aware of a vast spying conspiracy by the corporate-military-intelligence apparatus within the US.

CONTINUED...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/25/infr-j25.html?view=article_mobile

Why do they need to use all that on We the People?

The Last Gasp of American Democracy

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014

EXCERPT...

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

[font color="green"]The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. [/font green]

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

While I am willing to give the alphabet soup the benefit of the doubt, the spying is unconstitutional and undemocratic.

[GoneFishin]

13. The fact that the same close nit group of officials and intelligence agencies 1)"failed" to prevent

9/11, and 2) profited financially and/or through expansion of power, and 3) were the same people with the power to thwart any serious investigation is too much coincidence for me.

[Octafish]

63. Dots All Connected, GoneFishin. Here's how NYT op-ed put it in 2012...

The Deafness Before the Storm

By KURT EICHENWALD
The New York Times, OpEd SEPT. 10, 2012

EXCERPT...

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=0

[NYCButterfinger]

14. 9/11 could have been stopped. Period.

It's a sad day, but Americans will find out more information years from now.

[Octafish]

64. It may be all the bad beer and propaganda have addled American brains.

Otherwise, they'd understand what you wrote, NYCButterfinger. Here's how Kurt Eichenwald put it:

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush officials attempted to deflect criticism that they had ignored C.I.A. warnings by saying they had not been told when and where the attack would occur. That is true, as far as it goes, but it misses the point. Throughout that summer, there were events that might have exposed the plans, had the government been on high alert. Indeed, even as the Aug. 6 brief was being prepared, Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi believed to have been assigned a role in the 9/11 attacks, was stopped at an airport in Orlando, Fla., by a suspicious customs agent and sent back overseas on Aug. 4. Two weeks later, another co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota after arousing suspicions at a flight school. But the dots were not connected, and Washington did not react.

-- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=0

How Bush and his "administration" have escaped justice is one of the great shames of the government of the United States of America.

To me, the "government" used to be "We the People." I think that all changed on Nov. 22, 1963.

[MrMickeysMom]

15. Kick...

Huge Rec

[Octafish]

67. A Familiar Refrain: Justice Denied Due to Technical Difficulties.

Echoes of History:

Years later, in 2014, Hayden claimed that technical difficulties prevented exact geolocation. By the way, this is the same justification that he relied on post-9/11 to help institute the bulk collection program for phone metadata. Hayden told interviewers from Frontline: “Two guys, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, living in San Diego… come to the United States, call home, call Yemen, call a safe house in Yemen seven times. We intercepted every one of the calls, right? -- Bill Blunden, http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/conspiracy-anyone-inside-the-nsas-911-cover-up/

Sounds eerily like:

5. After the CIA announced on the afternoon of November 23 that a mistake had been made and that the tapes were no longer in existence, a memo from Hoover was personally delivered to the Secret Service on November 24 stating, once again, that the tapes were still in existence and that the Dallas FBI agents who listened to the tapes said that it was not Oswald’s voice. This memo also said that Oswald acted alone. On April 9, 1964, these tapes were played by Mexico City officers for Warren Commission staffers David Slawson and William Coleman, who did not realize that there was any question about whether the voice they were listening to was Oswald’s. These tapes are presently missing, and may have been destroyed. -- Bill Simpich, http://www.maryferrell.org/pages/State_Secret_Chapter6.html

Old news to you, MrMickeysMom. Never heard by -- I'd guess -- 99.9% of Americans.

[MrMickeysMom]

71. Here's the pity of it...

Not only has history's empirical data been disconnected from it's tragedies, but our "conventional wisdom" has now been reduced to rubble. We're seeing articles now of how maybe we should all just move on from the September 11th day of infamy.

Unless we persist in opening the blinders, starting what these authors have made abundantly clear about what some people were willing to do to stop our 35th President, we will NEVER face truth.

For part of those 99.9% of American's, they can read any number of these authors who looked at the actual RECORDS, verifiable by observation, rather than theory -

Considered the best research by Author, chronicle order

Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane (1966)

Accessories After the Fact, by Sylvia Meagher (1967)

Who Was Jack Ruby?, by Seth Kantor (1978)

In the Eye of History, by William Law (2004)

Oswald and the CIA, by John Newman (2008 Edition)

The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi (1993)

Let Justice Be Done, by Bill Davy (1999)

Breach of Trust, by Gerald McKnight (2005)

JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass (2008)

Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio (2012)

[Octafish]

72. Absolutely essential books (Cass Sunstein's just sayin')

Cass Sunstein said conspiracy theories were dangerous and then provided the rational to "move on" from prosecuting Bush and Cheney.

Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, (Sunstein) argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.

SOURCE w links n details: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/10/main-obama-adviser-blocking-prosecution.html?m=1

Which is why Bush and Cheney could do all manner of evil and get away with it, conspiracy or not.

[MrMickeysMom]

73. Jeeeeezuss...

This stuff was NAILED.

I am permalinking this thread. I particularly like this little ditty…

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."

As I've previously noted, conspiracies are a well-accepted legal principal, and it is commonly accepted that conspiracies occur every day, and only those conspiracies which involve powerful people are ridiculed as being nutty or dangerous.

So Sunstein is really saying the government should use its power to protect powerful people.

In.Your.Face stuff...

[Juicy_Bellows]

17. A dirty deed done dirty and with that knowledge, a heavy burden.

Thanks Octafish, you're absolutely one of my favorites.

[Octafish]

68. Bob Graham: FBI hindered Congress’s 9/11 inquiry, withheld reports about Sarasota Saudis

By Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers
June 5, 2013, BrowardBulldog.org

EXCERTPT...

Last month, the Department of Justice asked U.S. District Judge William Zloch to end the lawsuit, citing national security and saying the FBI has identified and released all documents responsive to its Sarasota probe.

But in his declaration, Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said those few pages “do not appear to be the full record of the FBI investigation.” He dismissed the government’s assertion that it lacks further documentation as “entirely implausible.”

“On a matter of this magnitude and significance, my expectation is that the FBI would have hundreds or even thousands of pages of documents,” Graham stated.

As evidence that records continue to be withheld, Graham cited a Sept. 16, 2002 FBI report about Sarasota that he was allowed to see after making inquiries at the FBI. That report should have been released, he said, but was not.

CONTINUED...

http://www.floridabulldog.org/2013/06/bob-graham-fbi-hindered-congresss-911-inquiry-by-withholding-reports-about-sarasota-saudis/

Striking is how NONE of this makes into on-air or online via Corporate Owned Media. Come to think of it, I don't think I see it in print, either.

One of the things that gets to me is how even great reporters like Christensen and Summers are afraid to mention researchers like Daniel Hopsicker and Wayne Madsen. They have put their own lives (and reputations) on the line to "go there" where even liberal publications like The Nation and CounterPunch won't.

PS: Thank you for the kind words, Juicy_Bellows! Please know your friendship means the world!

[seafan]

19. It seems like all the alphabet agencies have an agenda to pursue a coverup.

Russ Baker on the new Florida evidence that emerged in 2011:

After public disclosure of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks, people in the gated community took note of the rushed departure and disappearance of the Ghazzawi-al-Hiijjiis. After all, the attackers were not just overwhelmingly of Saudi nationality, but three out of four of the future hijackers had lived and trained to fly in Venice, Florida, just 10 miles away from the house.

The complex’s security officer alerted the FBI, which began an investigation into the house at 4224 Escondito Circle. (In addition, a suspicious neighbor alerted the FBI by email on the day of the attacks.)

The Justice Department declined to give the Herald a statement, but, according to an unnamed senior counterterrorism officer who was one of two people who got into the house first and served as a key source for the paper, the investigation bore stunning fruit.

Phone records showed communication, dating back more than a year, that connected those in the house with the alleged plot leader, Mohammed Atta and his accomplices, including eleven of the other hijackers. Other records, kept by guards at the gated community, documented numerous visits to the house by a vehicle known to have been used by Atta, and indicated the physical presence in the car of Atta’s purported accomplice Ziad Jarrah. It appeared as if the Ghazzawi house was some kind of nerve center for the entire operation.

According to the senior counterterrorism officer, both Esam Ghazzawi and his son-in-law al-Hiijjii had been on a watch list at the FBI predating 9/11. An unnamed U.S. agency tracking terror funds had also taken an interest in them. “464 was Ghazzawi’s number,” the officer said. “I don’t remember the other man’s number.”

These stunning revelations—said to be based on the work of the swarm of FBI agents who descended on the gated community in the fall of 2001—would surely have generated headlines worldwide if they had become known after 9/11. But the FBI, for reasons unknown, failed to provide the information to Congressional 9/11 investigators or to the presidential 9/11 commission, and thus it has remained a secret for the past decade.

In response to the Herald article, the FBI has issued a statement saying that the occupants of the house had been tracked down and interrogated, and were found to have no connections to the hijackers. It is not clear when these interrogations are supposed to have taken place, or whether they were conducted by the FBI or by Saudi intelligence. But given the FBI’s poor track record for candor in the matter, the statement is being viewed with some skepticism.

Adding to these doubts is an ineffective effort by the Bureau to woo the house owners back to Florida. According to Scott McKay, a lawyer for homeowners’ association of the gated community, known as Prestancia, the FBI attempted to convince the Ghazzawis they needed to come back in person to sign documents related to unpaid back dues to the association. This attempt proved unsuccessful when the Ghazzawis simply arranged to sign the documents elsewhere. These facts, reported by The Herald, raise questions about the U.S. government’s determination to interview the couple: Esam Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized in Lebanon—by a U.S. official no less—the vice consul at the US embassy in Beirut. His wife’s signature was also notarized—elsewhere in the United States, in Riverside County, California.

The emergence of this information chagrined Bob Graham, the former Florida U.S. Senator. Graham was Senate Intelligence Committee chair (and a 2004 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination) and served as co-chair of the congressional joint inquiry into 9/11. “At the beginning of the investigation,” he told The Herald, “each of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was asked to provide all information that agency possessed in relation to 9/11.” Graham noted that the Bureau also failed to turn over information connecting the hijackers to other Saudis living in California, which his own investigators later discovered on their own.

Just as strange, when Graham’s congressional investigators turned over a large body of information on the hijackers they had assembled to the presidential 9/11 Commission, it seemed uninterested. “They did very little with it,” Graham said, “and their reference to Saudi Arabia is almost cryptic sometimes. … I never got a good answer as to why they did not pursue that.”

About the new discovery in Sarasota, Graham said it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11.”

All Eyes on Prince Sultan

Of special interest is the Ghazzawis’ boss, the chairman of EIRAD Holding Co. Ltd., Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud. He is a prominent and powerful member of the ruling Saudi royal family who is expected to become crown prince, and thereby in line to become king. Born in 1956, which makes him approximately the same age as the Ghazzawi brothers, Prince Sultan bin Salman is a grandson of King Abdul Aziz (commonly referred to as Ibn Saud), founder of modern Saudi Arabia.

Bob Graham is still enraged over what our government has done, and is determined to bring it out into the open so that people can know.

So are we all.

[Ghost in the Machine]

20. Thanks for the post, seafan, it's very eye-opening. I have never seen this before and I am still

taking it in. I think more and more will come out over the next few years as some of the original people involved get older, more complacent... and slip up or forget what they are *supposed* to say.

Thanks for adding more to this thread... you never disappoint! I wish I could REC your post, too.

Peace,

Ghost

[seafan]

40. Thank you, Ghost.

That is very kind of you to say.

I don't think Bob Graham will rest until all of this ugly truth is finally shoved into the sunlight. When he speaks, I stop to listen to what he has to say.

Good to see you, Ghost.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

42. Bob Graham should be careful

not fly in small planes.

[JDPriestly]

75. Sultan bin Salman Al Saud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_bin_Salman_Al_Saud

[Holly_Hobby]

29. KnR!

[Raster]

30. L I H O P

[CanSocDem]

31. It's a sad state of affairs...

...when the 'war industry' can assume control of a peoples democracy. Their ability to enforce their point of view with an invisible killing machine, be it one VIP or thousands of regular citizens, is truly mystifying.

Thanks to you and the other brave citizens who have posted on this thread, the 'warlords' are having trouble sleeping. And every day I see a new poster breathlessly admitting to never having seen this evidence before. You are performing a great service.

The only thing that gets me up each day is the smell of revolution in the air. Here in Canada we are on the verge of electing our first social democratic federal government and as the winds of justice waft across the planets' final holdout, even the USA is toying with the idea of breaking the mold and confronting the warlords.

Keep up the good work my friend.

k&r

[Go Vols]

32. K&R

[bobthedrummer]

35. LIHOP K&R n/t

[Oilwellian]

45. I didn't see a mention of General Ahmed in the thread

He was the paymaster for the hijackers and was schmoozing Bush administration officials on the morning of 9/11.

Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly didn't commit - of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both the US government and Pearl's wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not responsible. Yet the Pakistani government is refusing to try other suspects newly implicated in Pearl's kidnap and murder for fear the evidence they produce in court might acquit Sheikh and reveal too much.

Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?

Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to "retire" by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?

The Guardian

[nationalize the fed]

50. The Guardian article doesn't mention Porter Goss

Goss had breakfast with Ahmad.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani general named Mahmud Ahmed -- the soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan's intelligence service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36091-2002May17_4.html

Here's one of the most important and rare video clips from that day. Porter Goss is giving a mini press conference outside the Capitol. This took place between the first strike in NY and 9:37- the official time of the Pentagon strike. During this event you can hear a huge explosion followed by jet noise - which is impossible according to the official narrative. This clip comes from National Geographics "Witness DC 9/11" available on youtube here: youtubeDOTcom/watch?v=DIfwsjF8X5U

This is proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that the official story about the Pentagon is a lie.

Does Porter Goss look surprised at what is going on?

Porter Goss has an interesting background. In the '60s he was a member of "Operation 40"-

Operation 40 was a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored undercover operation in the early 1960s, which was active in the United States and the Caribbean (including Cuba), Central America, and Mexico. The group was formed to seize control of the Cuban government after the Bay of Pigs Invasion...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_40

He was also a co-author of the "Patriot" act and co-chair of the original investigation. Then there was that curious resignation from CIA director -

On May 5, 2006 Goss' resignation from the CIA directorship was announced at a joint press briefing with President Bush at the White House. There was speculation in the press concerning the reasons of the sudden announcement...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Goss#Director_of_CIA

If you or I had breakfast with the man who financed one of the hijackers wouldn't we be questioned under oath?


911 changed everything. And we aren't supposed to question it. One day the truth will come out. And so called "Truthers" will be vindicated. Did you ever think you would live in a world where the very word "Truther" was derogatory?

Pentagon helipad clock
Description: This Skilcraft electric wall clock, which hung in the Pentagon helipad fire station, was knocked to the ground by the impact of American Airlines flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.

Context: When terrorists flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, the crash nearly took the nearby Pentagon helipad firehouse with it. The concussion caused the ceiling of the firehouse to collapse, temporarily trapping firefighter Dennis Young in the fallen debris. The blast also knocked this clock from the wall, freezing it at 9:32. The airplane actually struck the Pentagon at 9:38 am; apparently the clock was six minutes slow.
http://amhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/record.asp?ID=19

(there were other clocks found stopped at 9:32-5 minutes before the official time of the Pentagon strike)

[Karmadillo]

46. Thank you for this post, Octafish. The links

on this thread suggest MIHOP is not an unreasonable position.

[Rex]

48. If a 4 star general can look Congress in the eyes and lie his ass off and not be punished.

If the CIA can break into Congressional records, get caught and not be punished, then nothing else really matters. The PTB decided that Congress is a joke and will ruin/run things their own way...the NSA way.

[Octafish]

65. A money-making 4 star general lying his ass off.

5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks

Alex Kane
Alternet.org, August 16, 2013

Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, has invaded America’s television sets in recent weeks to warn about Edward Snowden’s leaks and the continuing terrorist threat to America.

[font color="green"]But what often goes unmentioned, as the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, is that Hayden has a financial stake in keeping Americans scared and on a permanent war footing against Islamist militants. And the private firm he works for, called the Chertoff Group, is not the only one making money by scaring Americans. [/font color]

Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize America's national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year. In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism.

What it all adds up to is a massive industry profiting off government-induced fear of terrorism, even though Americans are more likely to be killed by a car crash or their own furniture than a terror attack.

CONTINUED with details, links, etc:

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-companies-make-money-keeping-americans-terrified-terror-attacks

[CrawlingChaos]

62. HUGE K&R

And as always, Octafish, my deepest thanks for another excellent thread. You are THE BEST!!

[MoonRiver]

66. LIHOP

I will never forget.

[jmowreader]

74. The only way the NSA could have prevented 9/11...

...is if the Special Security Officer would have flown to Crawford in August 2001, stuffed Shrub head-first into a gopher hole until only his presidentin'-seal socks were sticking out then wedgemated him in by shoving a box turtle up his ass, and started making phone calls to airport security offices.

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF THE REASON 9/11 WAS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN IS GEORGE W. BUSH IGNORING THE THREAT UNTIL IT WAS TOO DAMN LATE!

Seriously: Shrub had a Presidential Daily Briefing that told him, in unambiguous terms, Osama bin Laden was going to try to blow up the country. We know what a hijacker looks like before he ever gets on a plane - they show up at the airfield with a one-way ticket paid for in cash, don't bring luggage and act scared out of their minds. If the airlines would have been watching for hijackers like they would have been if they'd been told to, if the Air Force would have had F-16s on ramp alert to intercept any rogue planes, if the fucking Pentagon wasn't violating every reg in the book by holding a command post exercise in the bowels of the Pentagon that used the names of real enemies (you're supposed to use notional countries so that if a real attack by the people whose name you're using happens, you won't confuse live traffic for exercise traffic)...9/11 would have been just another day.