Glenn Greenwald: More on Michael Mukasey's false 9/11 and FISA claims

[babylonsister]

Glenn Greenwald
Friday April 11, 2008 09:28 EDT
More on Michael Mukasey's false 9/11 and FISA claims

(updated below)


The San Francisco Chronicle became one of the few media outlets to report on the multiple false claims about 9/11 and FISA in Michael Mukasey's speech two weeks ago, as they adeptly summarized the key events in this article today. As the article, using the Lee Hamilton and other quotes reported here, put it: "It seemed like a sensational disclosure -- a phone call that, if traced and monitored, could have allowed authorities to thwart the attacks -- but it has proved difficult to verify."

Also, Mukasey appeared yesterday before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee and was questioned on this matter by Pat Leahy:

On his third question, Leahy asked Mukasey to clarify a recent comment he made in San Francisco where he implied that the failure to listen in on a phone call from Afghanistan to the United States prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had cost 3,000 lives.

"Nobody else seems to know about this. Can you tell me what the circumstances were and why?" Leahy said.

"The phone call I referenced relates to an incoming call that is referred to in a letter in February of this year to House Intelligence Committee Chairman {Silvestre} Reyes {(D-Texas)} from Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and I," Mukasey said.

"One thing I got wrong. It didn't come from Afghanistan. I got the country wrong," Mukasey continued without specifying the country where the call originated.

So finally, Mukasey, only because he has been forced to do so, admits that he was wrong in the facts of this alleged call. If the Attorney General is going to go around tearfully claiming that there was a pre-9/11 call that the Government was prevented by surveillance laws from investigating and which would have prevented the 9/11 attacks, wouldn't one think that he would actually know what he was talking about? He made a similar claim, though much more vaguely, in a letter he signed two weeks earlier to Congress. How does one just get something like that wrong -- a bombshell which the Chronicle described as "sensational" -- if it really happened?

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/11/mukasey/index.html

[Supersedeas]

1. and more crickets from Establishment Journalists -- what's the big budget new room for anyways?

[Richard Steele]

2. K&R