"You can do an investigation, and if you don't really want to research an area, you just don't look at it. If you don't ask them all of the questions, or you don't let them tell you the whole story, ya know... then you can write a report based on half-truths." - 9/11 Family Member, September Eleventh Advocate, "Jersey Girl" Mindy Kleinberg

Source: www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com

Jon Gold
5/1/2013
Updated: 5/5/2013

Hopefully, you remember the time right after 9/11. A time when we were told repeatedly that there were absolutely no warnings, and that no one had any idea something like that could happen. If not, feel free to browse the "9/11 Denials" section available at www.historycommons.org.

"The Pentagon announced it is boosting "cybersecurity" personnel to 4,900. Is this really a move for defense, or to ramp up efforts to spy on Americans?".

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/pentagon-boosts-cybersecurity/5...

"Google demands probable-cause, court-issued warrants to divulge the contents of Gmail and other cloud-stored documents to authorities in the United States — a startling revelation Wednesday that runs counter to federal law that does not always demand warrants.

The development surfaced as Google publicly announced that more than two-thirds of the user data Google forwards to government agencies across the United States is handed over without a probable-cause warrant.

A Google spokesman told Wired that the media giant demands that government agencies — from the locals to the feds — get a probable-cause warrant for content on its e-mail, Google Drive cloud storage and other platforms — despite the Electronic Communications Privacy Act allowing the government to access such customer data without a warrant if it’s stored on Google’s servers for more than 180 days.

“Google requires an ECPA search warrant for contents of Gmail and other services based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure,” Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman, said"

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/google-says-get-a-warrant/

"Following the pattern set by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Justice Department last week refused to disclose how, when, and how often the federal government uses GPS to track vehicles.

As a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition filed last July, on January 16 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) received two internal Justice Department memos setting out the department’s policies regarding tracking of citizens using GPS technology.

At least that’s what the documents purported to reveal. In reality, the pair of memos sent to the ACLU by the DOJ were largely blacked out, leaving all but the barest of background information completely redacted.

As is customary among the participants in the government project to place every American under constant surveillance and make every citizen a suspect, Justice Department attorneys argue that the information requested by the ACLU in the FOIA petition could be used to help criminals escape capture by law enforcement.

The ACLU isn’t convinced, however.

From salon.com

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.
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Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.”

Post-9/11, NSA 'enemies' include us
By: James Bamford
September 8, 2011

Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.

Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.

Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.

There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.

Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn’t know they were here, until it was too late.

The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September the 11th helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities. The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time.

-President Bush, December 17, 2005

In the aftermath of 9/11, reams of newsprint were given over to discussing the CIA and FBI failures before the attacks; the agency had some of the hijackers under surveillance and allegedly lost them, the bureau was unable even to inform its own acting director of the Zacarias Moussaoui case. However, the USA’s largest and most powerful intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, got a free ride. There was no outcry over its failings, no embarrassing Congressional hearings for its director. Yet, as we will see, the NSA’s performance before 9/11 was shocking.

March 2, 2010, 11:00 PM ET

Details of “Einstein” Cyber Shield Disclosed by White House

The Obama administration lifted the veil Tuesday on a highly-secretive set of policies to defend the U.S. from cyber attacks.

It was an open secret that the National Security Agency was bolstering a Homeland Security program to detect and respond to cyber attacks on government systems, but a summary of that program declassified Tuesday provides more details of NSA’s role in a Homeland program known as Einstein.

The current version of the program is widely seen as providing meager protection against attack, but a new version being built will be more robust–largely because it’s rooted in NSA technology. The program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary.

Kevin Fenton has updated this article; visit the original via the link at the bottom - loose nuke

A July 2001 telephone call between alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) and 9/11 coordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh was intercepted, apparently by the NSA. Prosecutors and FBI agents working on the Zacarias Moussaoui case later obtained detailed information about the call, and shared it with the 9/11 Commission.

A memo about the meeting with the commission was found at the National Archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson, who posted it to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd.

Judge Tosses NSA Spy Cases
By David Kravets | January 22, 2010 | 2:27 pm

A federal judge is dismissing lawsuits accusing the government of teaming with the nation’s telcos to funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision was a major blow to the two suits testing warrantless eavesdropping and executive branch powers implemented following the 2001 terror attacks. The San Francisco judge said the courts are not available to the public to mount that challenge.

“A citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have the government follow the law,” (.pdf) Walker ruled late Thursday.

12-31-09 revised 7-12-10

Summary and Analysis of "National Security Alert" by Chris Sarns

Like many others I was impressed with the Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) video "National Security Alert" (NSA) when I saw it for the first time. I thought that the unanimous testimony of the witnesses confirmed the north flight path of American Airlines flight 77, but I could not see how that in any way proved their "flyover theory". I did not give the "flyover" theory much thought because it seemed to be a minor point. As it turns out, the strong evidence for the north flight path was just the "hook", and "flyover" was actually their main point.

The most senior NSA official interviewed by the 9/11 Commission with a memo of interview in the recently released batch is undoubtedly Barbara McNamara. She joined the agency in 1963 and held a series of senior management positions, culminating in being deputy director from 1997 to 2000, before being put out to pasture as the NSA’s representative to London.

This is quite the most remarkable passage of the memo:

She does not recall being personally [asked] to provide about transcripts or raw data for [counterterrorism]. NSA has analysts posted across the community. But sharing of raw data is not done routinely by NSA unless they get a specific request for a specific item. She said that she does not remember people asking for raw data, but if they wanted it NSA would have provided it, particularly if they were called by the [CIA Director] or [Deputy CIA Director] or [Assistant CIA Director for Collection].

The National Security Agency drafted a "9/11 Retrospective" following the 2001 attacks, according to a document recently released by the National Archives.

Although an unclassified version of the Justice Department inspector general’s report into the FBI’s performance before 9/11 was published in full in 2006 and the executive summary of a parallel report by the CIA inspector general was released in 2007, this is the first known mention of any NSA review about its failings before the attacks.

The document released by the National Archives is an undated memo of an interview conducted by the 9/11 Commission of an unnamed NSA manager. The manager served as a congressional liaison in the late 1990s and then as a counterintelligence chief from 2000 to 2003. The memo was released last week and was also uploaded to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd by History Commons contributor Erik Larson.

Thanks to www.historycommons.org

(Spring 2000): NSA Does Not Inform FBI Hijacker Almihdhar Is in US, Reason Unclear

Posted in full for posterity; please visit the original and support Sibel Edmonds, 123realchange.blogspot.com and NSWBC.org:

http://123realchange.blogspot.com/2009/06/current-battle-against-state-s...

Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Current Battle against State Secrets Privilege: ‘Sanitization’ is not the answer By Sibel Edmonds

During the past few months I have been actively following the latest activity on the state secrets privilege (SSP). First, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this issue of extreme importance to our civil liberties and constitutional rights was finally getting long-over-due and deserved attention from the media. After all, the memories of fighting SSP in the federal courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, holding press conferences together with the ACLU to bring needed media attention to this draconian abuse, making the rounds in Congress to have them address this ‘privilege’ through legislation to restrict its misuse and abuse, are still fresh and vivid for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?_r=1&hp
N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: April 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

(When Mark Gaffney first published his article on "The 9/11 Mystery Plane" at the Journal of 9/11 Studies (PDF), representatives from CNN contacted him and asked Gaffney to "pull it", supposedly due to his use of some CNN screen captures. The article did eventually go back up, and a couple of months later, Anderson Cooper covered the E-4B's appearance on his CNN+show. Can you say, "Damage Control"? Cooper covered the 9/11 blogospheric links mentioning Gaffney's article, [including some free advertising for 911blogger], while somehow studiously avoiding any mention of Gaffney's article or the Journal. Ultimately, this only inspired Gaffney to write one of the best books on 9/11 to be published in the last six months, "The 9/11 Mystery Plane: And the Vanishing of America". If you can afford to in this troubled economy, please purchase a copy to show some support for Mr. Gaffney and his publisher, TrineDay. In the piece below, Gaffney provides his observations on Bamford's latest NSA book, which like Kevin Fenton's, are very critical of Bamford's support of the official 9/11 story. -rep.)

Eavesdropping on the World
James Bamford’s new book comes up short on 9/11

by Mark H. Gaffney - March 11, 2009

In January 2009, during Israel’s ferocious attacks on Gaza, there were numerous reports on the Internet that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert had boasted about “wagging the US dog.” Supposedly Olmert bragged that he had pulled Bush off a stage while the president was making a speech and demanded that Bush block a UN Security Council cease-fire resolution. The US had already vetoed an earlier cease-fire resolution in late December, but by the eighth of January, with the death toll rapidly mounting in Gaza, Israel’s war against Hamas was wearing thin. For days US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had been working with Arab and European governments to craft a cease-fire resolution that every member of the Security Council would support, including the US.

I just watched PBS Nova’s Spy Factory with James Bamford and I have a number of comments about it, both good and bad.

Starting off with the good, having been writing about al-Qaeda’s communications hub in Yemen for the last two years, I was thrilled to actually see it on the screen. Bamford actually went to Yemen and filmed it from the outside, shame he didn’t go in.

(snip)

The first and most glaring omission is Alec Station deputy chief Tom Wilshire, who was not mentioned at all in the programme. It went into some detail about the blocking of the cable written by Doug Miller, an FBI detailee to Alec Station, to FBI headquarters about Almihdhar’s US visa, but this was attributed merely to the CIA officer we refer to as “Michelle.” Wilshire was her boss, she blocked the cable on his orders, and Bamford knows this well—he wrote it in the book this programme was based on.

(You can watch the documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/program.html )

In case anyone didn't already know, PBS broadcast a very slick and almost unbelievable hour long attempt to reinforce the "incompetence theory" of 9/11.

Comments are now open and registration is pretty straightforward.

Kyle Hence has made a good start, let's give him plenty of support!

Go to:

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewforum.pbs?f=257

I think we should also demand an hour to correct the record, email the ombudsman at PBS, Michael Getler, at:

http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback.html

or call him at:

703-739-5290

Be civil, have your facts in order and keep it short and to the point.

Let's let PBS know that we are watching, brothers and sisters, and that we don't buy the BIG LIE.

Cheers!

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

(James Bamford has done another great deed for the public by revealing the extent of the NSA's wiretapping on U.S. soil, and how the NSA sub-contracts the vast majority of its work to Israeli high-tech firms bristling with "former" Israeli military intelligence agents, and in the case of Verint, a company with serious corruption issues. It was Bamford who popularized the existence of Operation Northwoods in his 2001 book, Body of Secrets. In The+Shadow+Factory, he sheds light in the secret rooms of Verizon and AT&T, and shows the NSA to be a very poor custodian of the nation's security.)

Bamford Brings the Goods

On October 14, 2008, James Bamford talked about some of the shocking research in his new book on Democracy Now!, with Amy Goodman;

(Continued below the fold...)

Although I am quite happy Amy Goodman is covering this stuff and that Bamford has at least put this on the table, there is definitely an odd way that Bamford has of using the word irony. He actually uses it correctly (semantically that is) when talking about the alleged hijackers living across the highway from Hayden's NSA office. That exchange is here:

AMY GOODMAN: You say that they set up their final base of operations almost next door to the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland?

James Bamford: “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America”

democracynow.org

Video
Click Here (RealPlayer)

10/14/2008

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, can you talk about how the NSA picked up the very first clues about the 9/11 attacks well before the 9/11 attacks?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the very first clue to the 9/11 attack occurred in late December 1999, when the NSA picked up a message from a house in Yemen. The house was being used by bin Laden as his operations center. He didn’t have much capability to operate out of Afghanistan, so all the phone calls, all the messages, email and all that would go to this house in the city of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for a number of years, and in late December 1999, it picked up a particular intercept, picked up a particular phone conversation.

On September 16, 2008, CIA Director and former Director of the NSA Michael V. Hayden came to speak to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. WeAreChangeLA decided to go and join the conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D1wThnJo3Y
Stewart Howe, taking the civil approach while referencing a speech Hayden gave to the CFR last year, asked the Director whether, in the post-9/11 United States of America, we were, in fact, witnessing the controlled demolition of the Constitution and Bill of Rights under the guise of a War on Terror.

Salon recently published an article entitled Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power about a database known as Main Core. The article was focused on domestic surveillance in the US and connected up with a lot of other threads I have noticed swirling around 9/11. It strikes me that this could be the key to uncovering how the intelligence agencies, in particular the NSA, failed in the run up to 9/11 (and a lot more besides), and I will try and explain here how and why I think Main Core could be linked to the attacks.

Given that the article also said that lawmakers are considering the launch of an investigation modelled on the Church Committee into the programme, as well as other aspects of surveillance, this represents a very decent chance of getting to the bottom of what actually happened.

Continued at the History Commons Groups blog.

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000002721511&parm1=5&...

"Eight years later came 9/11, famously labeled a failure to “connect the dots.” Eyewash. The CIA, FBI and others had dots. They hoarded them like marbles."

So, was the "failure to prevent" an intentional act to further an agenda, as well as treason and mass murder by US policy makers- or more like manslaughter, only involving "incompetence", criminal negligence, dereliction of duty and horrendous administrative and policy decisions rooted in ignorance, territoriality, ego, partisanship, spite, suspicion- or just the inevitable, "blameless" result an institutionalized culture of secrecy that "supposedly" has been changed? Instead of pursuing these questions, he continues with secrecy issues, the subject of the film being reviewed (in CQ Politics). Article has a nice summary of the bin Laden satellite phone-1998 NSA leak publication-Bush propaganda. In reference to abuse of secrecy:

"Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? A government of men, as it were, not laws.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm

The Last Roundup

For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

05/05/08 "Radar Magazine" -- - 28/04/08 --- -In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

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_ti...

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.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3117.shtml

By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor

Mar 31, 2008, 00:18

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In a recent speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Attorney General Michael Mukasey defended the Bush-Cheney administration’s illegal domestic spying agenda by proclaiming that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented if the government had been able to monitor overseas phone calls to the United States.

Like every other member of the Bush-Cheney administration, Mukasey is lying. Lying about the fact that the “war on terrorism” is a fabrication. Lying about the pervasive worldwide eavesdropping capabilities of US intelligence agencies. Lying about the fact that 9/11 was a long-planned Anglo-American false flag covert operation.

According to Mukasey’s spin on the now-classic 9/11 fiction, Bush-Cheney “knew there had been a call from some place 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. We’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn’t come home, to show for that.”

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."