Khalid Almihdhar

Mukasey: It wasn't Afghanistan

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has admitted that he garbled his claim about the pre-9/11 intercept of a call between an al-Qaeda facility overseas and the 9/11 hijackers in the US last week. Today he told the Senate:

"One thing I got wrong. It didn’t come from Afghanistan. I got the country wrong."
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2...340778#comments

I have been all over this and I know the other end of the call was in Yemen. Here is the timeline we compiled:
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&projects_and_programs=complete_911_timeline...

This is a huge issue for us. If people knew that the NSA was intercepting calls between the 9/11 hijackers in the US and a phone registered to a guy (Ahmed al-Hada) who had previously helped bin Laden murder about 240 people (including 29 Americans), but didn't bother to trace the calls, what would they think about 9/11?

The 9/11 Commission knew about this, but included only two cryptic references to it in its report. This reflects very badly on the 9/11 Commission.

Who Is Margaret Gillespie?

Jon Gold has been kind enough to let me write an introduction to one of his Who Is? series. It deals with Margaret Gillespie, the FBI agent who discovered that two of the 9/11 hijackers were in the US shortly before the attacks:

Margaret Gillespie was an FBI agent who, while detailed to Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, was involved in the search for Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi in the summer of 2001. She attended the stormy 11 June meeting between the CIA and FBI and, at the suggestion of CIA manager Tom Wilshire, performed a low-key review of al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit, where the CIA let two of the 9/11 hijackers slip through their fingers in early 2000. Because Wilshire only told her to perform the review in her “free time,” she did not find and realise the significance of CIA cables indicating Almihdhar and Alhazmi had entered the US until 21 August 2001 – even though the review started in May. However, she immediately called the FBI, alerting them they should look for the two, and had Almihdhar, Alhazmi, an alias for their associate Khallad bin Attash, and an Iraqi named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir watchlisted on 23 August.

Attorney General Lies about Yemen Hub

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."

Disconnecting the Dots - How CIA officer Tom Wilshire hid two 9/11 hijackers from the FBI

I have written a summary of the 9/11 Timeline's CIA Hiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar chapter. It begins:

Parts of the story of the CIA’s knowledge of the 9/11 hijackers have trickled out over the years since the attacks, contained in three reports, of the Congressional Inquiry, 9/11 Commission and Justice Department, as well as in books, in particular the Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, and evidence presented at the trial of Zacarias Moussoaui. When all the information is put together, two conclusions stand out: everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and almost every time something went wrong, the same man was at the centre of the failure: Tom Wilshire, deputy chief of Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, and later CIA liaison to the FBI.

A meeting in Malaysia

9/11 Timeline Obtains Major New FBI Document

“A contributor to the History Commons has obtained a 298-page document entitled Hijackers Timeline (Redacted) from the FBI, subsequent to a Freedom of Information Act request. The document was a major source of information for the 9/11 Commission's final report. Though the commission cited the timeline 52 times in its report, it failed to include some of the document's most important material.

The printed document is dated November 14, 2003, but appears to have been compiled in mid-October 2001 (the most recent date mentioned in it is October 22, 2001), when the FBI was just starting to understand the backgrounds of the hijackers, and it contains almost no information from the CIA, NSA, or other agencies. This raises questions as to why the 9/11 Commission relied so heavily on such an early draft for their information about the hijackers.”

More here:
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/fbi911timeline
(Local mirror of zip file: 7.8 MB)

Summary of what the FBI document reveals:

Yemen Hub - Sumamry of 9/11 Timeline Chapter

I wrote a summary of the Yemen Hub chapter in the 9/11 Timeline. It is about the NSA listening to the hijackers' calls and how their explanation for why they didn't catch the hijackers based on the intercepts doesn't make any sense.

It begins:

Yemen Hub: NSA was listening in on the 9/11 hijackers’ calls for years

And how this became the rationale for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program

The “Yemen hub” was an al-Qaeda communications hub that fell under US surveillance in the mid-late 1990s and was also home to Khalid Almihdhar, said to have been on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11. There are still many unanswered questions about the surveillance, such as why were the NSA and its fellow agencies unable to roll up the plot based on the intercepts? And how did it come to be used as the justification for the NSA’s current domestic warrantless program?

You can find it here:
http://www.iraqtimeline.com/blog/

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