Posted on 05/15/2016 5:34:36 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Former National Security Agency technical director and surveillance state whistleblower William Binney has long said 9/11 could have been prevented had the NSA not capitulated to big-money private contractors less than a month prior to the attacks. Mainstream media, perhaps capitulating to its own monied corporate owners, relegated Binney’s explosive claims to the backburner for years.
However, on Thursday — two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee began debating whether or not to reauthorize massive and controversial NSA surveillance programs — Salon finally headlined Binney’s damning claim and its backstory.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, could have been thwarted using information the NSA had available but didn’t catch, as well as through communications with other agencies it simply didn’t bother to undertake. And, according to Binney — who is often called the ‘original’ NSA whistleblower — most of the failure boils down to private contractor cash.
Binney spearheaded an elaborate metadata analysis and surveillance program named ThinThread, which promised both efficacy and privacy protection. But just a few weeks before the attacks, the NSA pulled the plug on ThinThread in favor of private intelligence contractor SAIC’s Trailblazer — a more expensive, privacy-invasive, and worse, less effective surveillance tool.
On September 12, Binney decided to find out who had carried out such a nefarious plot — and why it hadn’t been stopped. Because NSA director Michael Hayden sent staff home both on the 11th and 12th, Binney snuck into work disguised as a janitor to attempt to glean any information that might help explain how the agency tasked with protecting the security of the nation could have missed hints such a major operation was impending.
As he explains in the forthcoming documentary about his experience, “A Good American,” cited by Salon, some contractors working in the same unit as Binney received a warning.
“While I was in there trying to look at the material on my computer,” Binney said, “the president of the contracting group that I had working on ThinThread came over to me and said he’d just been in a contractor meeting” with a former top SAIC manager who’d returned to the NSA to work on Trailblazer. Those contractors had been advised not to criticize firms like SAIC for failing precisely what their job putatively entailed — preventing terror strikes like 9/11.
“Do not embarrass large companies,” Binney claims the SAIC manager told a contractor. “You do your part, you’ll get your share, there’s plenty for everybody.” In short: keep quiet, get paid.
Binney and his like-minded NSA colleague, Thomas Drake, suspected SAIC’s Trailblazer — and thus SAIC — shouldn’t have missed the mark.
Though Binney and a number of others left the NSA when it instituted the illegal wiretap program, Stellar Wind, Drake remained at his post — and tested ThinThread to “find out if there’s any information of the 9/11 attack that we should have known about but didn’t,” he explained.
“We discovered critical intelligence, al Qaeda and associated movement intelligence that had never been discovered by the NSA,” Drake says in “A Good American.” “They didn’t even know that they had it in their databases.”
As Salon put it, “The NSA’s clunky systems not only didn’t prevent the attack, as Drake’s test of ThinThread suggests Binney’s program might have, but it couldn’t identify relevant data about the attack in NSA’s possession even after the attack.”
Trailblazer was an utter failure. An investigation and subsequent report by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General — conducted following complaints from Binney, Drake, and their colleagues — led to the shuttering of the program. But Trailblazer wasn’t the sole failing of the NSA in the September 11 attacks.
Several former NSA employees accused the agency of failing to share critical information with the CIA and FBI prior to 9/11. More contentiously, former employees have intimated both the communications failure and the choice to proceed with SAIC’s inept surveillance program might not constitute such an accidental error.
Whether or not ill intent underlies the NSA’s failings in the 9/11 tragedy will likely never be known — but the fact Binney’s experience has now hit mainstream headlines denotes a step in the direction toward the truth.
Au contraire, I have learned quite a lot about you already - more than enough to safely chuck you in the “part of the problem” category.
If in 2016 you still haven’t figured out that we went into Iraq based on a false case, you’re clearly the learning-impaired individual in this conversation.
Thank Jamie Gorelick:
According to Gorelick’s op-ed letter in the Washington Post[13] she states that: “At last week’s hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that ‘the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents’ and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo.”
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Gorelick<
Yes, the same Jamie Gorelick who made 10’s of Millions at Fannie Mae, constructing the house of cards in the mortgage industry, by demanding unqualified borrowers be approved. “from 1998 to 2002 Gorelick received a total of $26,466,834.00”
“Would you ever accept that there be a conspiracy theory that involves the federal government, but not GWB himself?”
Only if I took crazy pills. Skull and bones was his beginning. His dad was director of CIA and was in the background of everything creepy that happened from JFK right up through the 70s. Poppy bush literally said he couldn’t recall where he was when JFK was shot.
His grandfather was a creepy NWO banker who narrowly avoided prosecution for his pro Nazi efforts even after the war began. His brother was in the S&L scandal and cost the taxpayers a billion plus.
Everywhere you see a Bush, you see a Saudi.
100 years of his family doing this crap. At this point a Bush involved in spy crap, skullduggery (even literally digging up skulls) dope, or shady financial dealings gets NO presumption of innocence.
It’s like fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 583 times since the 1920s, shame on me.
Yes, Bush knew. He just knows how to work the aw shucks loveable Christian guy shtick.
“One hit during Bushs term and they we took major action. Tired of the Bush bashing on this issue.”
BS. 9/11 was a very different animal than an embassy in Africa getting bombed. And the major action we took was to assist the northern alliance (islamists) to wipe out the other islamists in Afghanistan.
Bush protected the Saudis from scrutiny, let them scurry away, and attacked everyone except the people who did it.
Then he attacked Iraq that had no connection at all to 9/11. Then his conduct in that war was idiotic. Running unarmed supply trucks down MSRs for years so they could be blasted with IEDs. He did that longer than WWII lasted and couldn’t figure it out.
He did nothing to stop the Iranians who were killing out men as fast as they could.
And his incompetence is still with us today. we were in WWII for 3.5 years. This middle east crap is 15 years now with no end in sight. Obama has made it worse, but Bush is equally cuplable
I worked there for 33 years before retiring in 1997. In the 80s, I PCSd to Southwest Asia, and did several other TDY missions in the Theater. I worked with those folks whose only focus on life was local comms. There were just too few of them to cope with the ocean of traffic that these systems funneled to the severely overworked linguists. They, military and civilian, are true patriots.
I am very interested in your comments. Why was Mohammed Atta protected, and by whome, for what purpose? Under whose order?
No one cares still after 911. They have left our borders wide open for Isis or others to bring in WDM easily. And we know Isis has them.
Like the CIA, NASA has morphed into irrelevance to Conservative Americans. It’s a leftist think tank.
Like the CIA, NASA has morphed into irrelevance to Conservative Americans. It’s a leftist think tank.
(I didn’t mean NASA!)
Ohhhhh,,,, got it. So Bush was only following a law passed by Clinton when he went Thanks for clearing that up.
Poor Bush, Clinton forced him into it.
LOL
Of course, I never said any such thing.
I think your words in post 83 is all anyone needs to read to help sort things out.
But don’t forget JFK came from a family of high level organized crime that made their money bootlegging whiskey. You act as if they were from Camelot.
Several agencies could have stopped it such as ICE. ICE is a waste of tax dollars. We have untold numbers who have come here with very little background checks and have overstayed their visas. Ice does nothing. ICE can’t find an illegal in the middle of a Cinco de Mayo parade because they’re hiding out far, far away.
I know only what you do - the rest is just experience.
bump
What is the connection between OBL and 1993 WTC? Haven’t heard that one before.
OBL/Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
Yeah, I saw your statement. I don’t have the connection.
A link to the bomb builder Ramzi Yousef or some of the other characters?
IIRC this program MAY have prevented 9/11. Not WILL have. Big difference.
Blind sheikh?
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