http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/11/MNRH103EK8.DTL&hw=mukasey&sn=001&sc=1000

Two weeks after Attorney General Michael Mukasey tearfully told a San Francisco audience the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the government had been able to wiretap a phone call from Afghanistan, the Justice Department is still trying to explain what he meant, and a congressional leader is demanding answers.
Among the questions posed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., to Mukasey is whether any such phone call actually occurred and, if so, why the government wasn't able to use its legal and technological powers to monitor it.
The attorney general, speaking to the Commonwealth Club on March 27, defended President Bush's program of wiretapping calls between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without court authorization and said no warrant should be needed to eavesdrop on a phone call from Iraq to the United States.

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

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.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/mukaseys-missed-call

Posted by Kurt Opsahl
Yesterday, Senator Leahy asked tough questions [Audio Excerpt MP3, 2.75MB] and this morning the San Francisco Chronicle continued its investigation of the mysterious phone call that Attorney General Mukasey referenced while speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco a few weeks ago. During the questions after his speech, Mukasey said that the government:

shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about ... We knew that there has 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.