Attorney General Michael Mukasey is the latest government official to lie about the Yemen hub calls, which he used as a justification for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping programme. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, "we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

This is obviously a reference to the Yemen hub (summary here), which was previously used as a justification for the NSA warrantless program by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden. When the NY Times broke the wiretapping story in December 2005, it was the first justification Bush reached for.

There are a number of problems with Mukasey's claims.

(1) The “safe house” was not in Afghanistan, but in Sana'a, Yemen.

(2) It was not a safe house, but al-Qaeda’s main global communications hub; a jihadi from one part of the world would call in and leave a message for a jihadi from somewhere else, then the other jihadi would call in to collect the message. Starting in 1998, the FBI mapped al-Qaeda’s entire global network based on intercepts from this facility. The map was posted on the wall of the Bureau’s I-49 squad in New York. Bin Laden himself made dozens of calls to the safe house between 1996 and 1998 (at a time the NSA was intercepting bin Laden’s calls). The communications hub was involved in not only 9/11, but also the 1998 embassy bombings (see also here, here, here, and here) and the attack on the USS Cole (also here and here).

(3) It was not one call, but a series of calls…

Continued @ link.