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Today is
General Michael V. Hayden, now head of the CIA, has testified before at least one congressional committee with some resentment about flak caught by the NSA for its performance leading up to 9/11. With all due respect, any touchiness should be directed elsewhere than at critics.
Nobody disputes the NSA's data-collecting capabilities. The NSA has the technology -- this is an item not disputed -- to pick up phone calls, land line or cell; wires; emails; faxes; wire transfer -- you name it; if it's electronic, satellite, radio or ‘telephonic’ as the FBI puts it, they can get to it. This is the huge area of specialization for the National Security Agency, being able to reap enormous harvests of information from media around the globe via satellite among other transmissions. A delightful man with whom I used to ride the commuter train, who had recently retired from the NSA – “No Such Agency,” he’d said, when we did the usual where-do-you-work chitchat -- told me with a little twinkle in his eye, “You know that movie Enemy of the State [the Will Smith popcorn movie, portraying extensive financial and personal peeking]? We can do all of that.”
For further insight, watch the movie. BTW, one notes that the name of the screenwriter is Marconi; is a family scion giving some payback to the public, for what old Marconi the radio-waves guy unwittingly let the public in for? Be that as it may, the film is actually surprisingly well written.
Back to the NSA: no mere elected official can count on being able to check or monitor what the NSA is doing, either. Nor can any other entity among the raft of agencies in the Intelligence Community, including the two largest, the CIA and the FBI. Anyone who thinks there has been extensive coordination and information-sharing in the new dawn since 9/11 is living in a dream world. Major problems persist, including the ludicrous creation of a new and deeply troubled bureaucracy in the ‘Department of Homeland Security’ and its TSA (Transportation Security Administration, but called other names including “Terrorist Support Agency” by aviation security experts like former FAA specialist Steve Elson). But even leaving ‘homeland security’ and the TSA out of the equation – as some in the Intelligence Community are inclined to do – the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon have their own problems. Summing up, (1) the Pentagon is mired down in debilitating internal strife: some of its better individuals are fighting a losing battle to ward off an ongoing White House campaign, in place since late 2000, to keep the U.S. Army off balance, while its worst brown-nosers are going along with the Army-weakening practices. (2) The CIA has undergone extensive reorganization, to put it politely, in the scandal and turmoil of White House and OVP efforts to use the CIA to get an illegitimate war going in the
These agencies are in little better condition than is Congress to rein in, or even to detect, problems at the NSA – even if the company monitoring NSA’s electronic surveillance were NOT the enormously bought-in Booz, Allen. But more on that later.
Meanwhile, I keep coming back to that simple question about why being head of the NSA on 9/11 was such a resume-brightener. Given how utterly the NSA fell down on the job, why was the then-NSA head promoted to head of the CIA? Gen. Hayden himself, in one congressional hearing, read aloud with some resentment what he deemed harsh criticisms of the NSA by the 9/11 Commission, suggesting that the NSA could have protected Americans from 9/11 had it not been limited.
This argument is an obvious canard. Actually, the NSA could and did track the 9/11 skyjackers: 1) the hijackers began their activities overseas, monitored by our intelligence service and those of several other countries, as we now know; 2) both the FBI and the CIA had the hijackers on the big board; and 3) let's see, now -- what was that other factor? -- oh yes: they were FOREIGN: PURSUING THEM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH EAVESDROPPING ON AMERICANS by military-security profiteering corporations or by anyone else including government personnel.
Why does Congress keep overlooking this simple point? Could it have anything at all to do with the legalized bribery that we call corporate lobbying? Or with the revolving door between Congress and the biggest corporate lobbying firms?
Or is there actually another issue? Did 9/11 surveillance – assuming there was any – perhaps have to do with surveillance on at least some Americans? This is not a frivolous question. The question in my title to this blog is not a joke. Here's some of the 9/11 wiretapping that I, as a
1) did NSA get a FISA court order for surveillance of American Airlines and United Airlines, including but not limited to ticket transactions and communications including "black box" recordings from the hijacked planes?
2) did NSA get a FISA court order for surveillance of the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) on 9/11, or of Andrews Air Force Base, or of anybody connected with either, to determine why no fighter planes were scrambled from nearby Andrews rather than from bases inconveniently, oddly, farther away?
3) did NSA get a FISA court order for surveillance of the FBI or of any part of the FBI, just prior to or just after the removal of the late John O'Neill from the FBI? Note: John O’Neill, if you recall, was the FBI honcho regarded as the world’s foremost pursuer of Osama bin Laden (remember him?) before 9/11. O’Neill’s career abruptly came to grief after his briefcase was temporarily stolen from his side while he attended an FBI convention. The briefcase was found undamaged in a hotel room a few blocks away, but O’Neill was disciplined for the security gaffe and ended up employed in security for the World Trade Center, where he perished a week later. Something about all this reminds me that I’ve always thought one of Bush-Cheney’s primary motivations in life was envy of individuals more dedicated and more able than they.
4) did NSA get a FISA court order for surveillance involving the Pentagon, during or after the attack on the Pentagon?
Follow-up question: if not, why not?
And if you did do any of the above surveillance, then when will the American people be allowed to know the results? Surely at this stage the argument cannot be made that national security would be compromised by the public’s knowing more about appropriate investigation.
And if there was not an appropriate investigation, the public has a right to know that. Here's the wrap-up, gentlemen: what exactly was the NSA doing on 9/11? Please tell me you weren't just gearing up for attack on Iraq and Afghanistan; please tell me you were indeed checking on the nexus between foreign and domestic that was wreaking such destruction on that day.
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