Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA
in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, and found that it had been
closely monitoring the 9/11 hijackers
as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with
Osama bin Laden's operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped
bin Laden's satellite phone, starting in 1996.
***
PBS also found that "the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into NSA's
role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center
and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full
extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never
put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the
CIA and the FBI."
In a review of Bamford's book, former
senator and 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey wrote,
"As the 9/11 Commission later established, U.S. intelligence officials
knew that al-Qaeda had held a planning meeting in Malaysia, found out
the names of two recruits who had been present -- Khalid al-Mihdhar
and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- and suspected that one and maybe both of them
had flown to Los Angeles. Bamford reveals that the NSA had been eavesdropping
for months on their calls to Yemen, yet the agency 'never made the effort'
to trace where the calls originated. 'At any time, had the FBI been
notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter
of seconds.'"
Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer
told PBS, "None of this information that we're speaking about this evening's
in the 9/11 Commission report. They simply ignored
all of it."
Not only was then-Director Michael Hayden never held accountable for
the NSA's alleged failure, but he went on to oversee the Bush administration's
vast expansion of domestic surveillance. In 2006, he was appointed as
director of the CIA.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
And since the NSA reports
directly to the White House, the whole allegation that "turf wars"
between the different intelligence agencies caused 9/11 holds no water.
In reality, the NSA and other intelligence services conveyed sufficient
information to the White House to stop 9/11, but the White House ignored
it and shut down further investigation.
