FISA Court Prevented Al Qaeda Taps Before 9/11

Sweetness & Light ^ | December 27, 2005 | N/A

[Sam Hill]

How soon (and conveniently) the media forget.

Behold this passage from the May 2002 issue of the DNC organ, Newsweek:

US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth

WHAT WENT WRONG

The inside story of the missed signals and intelligence failures that raise a chilling question: did September 11 have to happen?

By Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
May 27/02

...NEWSWEEK has learned there was one other major complication as America headed into that threat-spiked summer.

In Washington, Royce Lamberth, chief judge of the special federal court [the FISA Court] that reviews national-security wiretaps, erupted in anger when he found that an FBI official was misrepresenting petitions for taps on terror suspects. Lamberth prodded Ashcroft to launch an investigation, which reverberated throughout the bureau.

From the summer of 2000 on into the following year, sources said, the FBI was forced to shut down wiretaps of Qaeda-related suspects connected to the 1998 African embassy bombing investigation.

“It was a major problem,” said one source familiar with the case, who estimated that 10 to 20 Qaeda wiretaps had to be shut down, as well as wiretaps into a separate New York investigation of Hamas.

The effect was to stymie terror surveillance at exactly the moment it was needed most...

And yet elsewhere Judge Lamberth has bizarrely cited the African embassy wiretaps as proof of the importance of his job:

An Interview with Judge Royce C. Lamberth

Judge Royce C. Lamberth, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was appointed to the federal bench in 1987. Before joining the Judiciary he was a U.S. Army Captain in the JAG Corps, an assistant U.S. attorney, and Chief of the Department of Justice Civil Division. He recently completed a term as presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Q: You've called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "the least known, but probably most important court in the war on terrorism?" Why?

A: The FISC has nationwide jurisdiction to authorize the United States government to conduct electronic surveillances and physical searches for national security purposes when the target is a foreign power or the individual is acting as the agent of a foreign power. Major international terrorist groups may be targeted by the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies. Since 9-11, invaluable intelligence information has been sought and obtained as a result of warrants and orders issued by this court.

There's no question that every judge who has ever served on this court has thought it was the most significant thing they've ever done as a judge. When I did the hearings on the embassy bombings in Africa, we started the hearings in my living room at 3:00 in the morning. And some of the taps I did that night turned out to be very significant and were used in the New York trials of the people indicted for the bombings.

These wiretaps were so "significant" that Lamberth stopped them and any others like them in the year and a half prior to 9/11 -- just because of a personal snit.

Something to bear in mind when we hear it bewailed how Bush neglected to go to the FISA courts for permission to monitor al Qaeda phone calls.

[Sam Hill]

Of course the main purpose of the Newsweek article cited was to blame Bush for not being aggressive enough in the collection of intelligence prior to 9/11.

[Sam Hill]

Lest we forget.

[hole_n_one]

bttt!

[eyespysomething]

I hate them all. The liberal judges, the media, I really hate them all. The media too (did I say that already?)

[mware]

Ping

[Reactionary]

There's something fishy going on between the Clintonistas and al Qaeda.

How else to explain it?

[mware]

Come on over and check this out.

[Peach]

FORMER SENIOR WHITE HOUSE AIDE

ACCUSES FEDERAL JUDGE

OF POSSIBLE LINKS TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS

By

Martin Dillon

A former White House aide with a Secret clearance warned US Attorney General, John Ashcroft a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that a Federal Judge with connections to Islamic fundamentalists, refused to authorize over 20 FBI wiretaps on Al Qaeda suspects before 9/11.

Barbara Honegger, now a Senior Military Affairs Research Journalist in the Department of Defense, named the judge as Royce Lamberth. He is the chief judge in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It meets once a week in the Justice Department to consider wiretap requests.

Senator Arlen Specter, a member of the Congressional Intelligence Committee sitting in Washington to investigate the intelligence background to 9/11, has said he will call Judge Lamberth to testify.

In the Reagan Administration Honegger served as a high-level appointee in the Justice Department, heading a task force for the Attorney General.

Her bombshell claim is contained in documents Globe-Intel has seen. They confirm that her memo to Ashcroft is now under investigation by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees sitting in Washington.

Given her seniority, her claim will almost certainly fuel the controversy about the US intelligence community failure.

Judge Royce Lamberth presides over a court of seven judges set up under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Since then it has authorized 7,500 wiretap requests. The majority have been to tap foreign embassies in the US and abroad.

Her revelations came hours after President Bush had announced (Thursday) that he was setting up a new Homeland Defense Ministry.

Washington sources have told Globe-Intel that among the first tasks the Ministry will face is to investigate Honegger’s claims.

Globe-Intel has also learned that FBI Director, Robert Mueller, personally authorized that Honegger should be questioned.

That happened on April 4 when San Diego FBI Field Agent, Sean Moore, interviewed her.

Her allegations move the story of who-knew-what- and when beyond the now celebrated thirteen-page memo veteran FBI agent, Coleen Rowley sent to Mueller.

In her lengthy memo to Attorney General Ashcroft, Honegger states:

“It is absolutely critical that Congress obtain the list of the names of the up to 20 suspected Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist operatives whose wiretaps were shut down or refused by Judge Royce Lambert and the FISA Court and match them with the names of the 20 9/11 hijackers, as well as with the names of all post 9/11 detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and elsewhere,”

Honegger held sensitive posts in the White House during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush snr. She is the author of a highly-acclaimed book dealing with the Iran-Contra affair.

Honegger has confirmed to Globe-Intel why she has demanded Judge Lamberth be investigated for possible complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

“On Sept. 19, 2001, a week after the attacks, I sent an "Extreme Alert"
to Attorney General Ashcroft and Thomas Picard, the FBI investigator in
charge of the New York based 9-11 investigation, by e-mail, alerting them
to evidence that the Chief Judge of this very FISA (Federal Intelligence
Surveillance Act) Court, Royce C. Lamberth, may have himself been
acting with and on behalf of Islamic extremists.


“In the mid 1980s, an Iranian fluent in Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Russian, and a number of other languages was in frequent contact by telephone with someone he described as `my good buddy Royce, an important judge in Washington, who got me into this country.’ Further questioning of this individual, who also claimed to be a mullah able to perform Islamic marriages and funerals, led to me being told that the last name of the Washington judge was Lamberth.


“My 9/19/01 Lamberth Alert e-mail was received by
Attorney General Ashcroft and/or FBI Headquarters, as I was interviewed
by an FBI agent from a local field office regarding this communication,
at which time the agent showed me the headquarters case number
for my memo and its follow up. At my request and with his agreement,
a colleague from a federal personnel security agency sat in on that meeting
as a witness. The Congressional House and Senate Intelligence
Committees have also been made aware of these facts.

“Given this context, it is critical to the 9-11 Congressional
investigation that, prior to 9-11, this same Chief FISA Court Judge Royce Lamberth shut down "up to 20" FISA wiretaps of Al Qaeda-related suspects
linked to the near-simultaneous -- "twin" -- 1998 Africa U.S. embassy
bombings. These 20 may well be, or significantly overlap with, the 20 9-11
hijackers -- 19 plus suspected "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui.

“It is therefore absolutely critical that Congress obtain the list
of names of all of the "up to 20" suspected Al Qaeda and other Islamic
extremist operatives whose wiretaps were shut down or refused by Judge Lamberth and the FISA Court, and match them with the names of the 20 9-11 hijackers, as well as with the names of all post 9-11 detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.”

“For the 9-11 investigation to have integrity, Congress must have
the courage to aggressively pursue these facts and leads, and be sure
not to prematurely close the door to any hypothesis - no matter how
"unthinkable." 9-11 was also unthinkable -- before it happened.”

Ends



Martin Dillon is a world-ranking authority on Eastern European intelligence. He is also the author of the global bestsellers: The Shankill Butchers (Random House), The Dirty War (Random House) and God and the Gun (Routledge, New York).

[digger48]

There's a reason the President is afforded powers such as this. Do we want all national security issues decided by 535 Congressmen and Senators or hundreds of ideologically inclined judges?

[Names Ash Housewares]

"I hate them all. The liberal judges, the media, I really hate them all. The media too (did I say that already?)"


I hear ya. I will never forgive them or forget. But, that being said, Turn it to something good. We are beating them. They are going to get more desperate. Let them lose their heads and alieante even more voters. Let them waste time on hate, let us use our minds and engage them anywhere we can. I am welcoming these battle lately. They are so very wrong on so many things. It is making it much easier to convince and warn others.

[Modok]

From the summer of 2000 on into the following year, sources said, the FBI was forced to shut down wiretaps of Qaeda-related suspects connected to the 1998 African embassy bombing investigation.

====

So the FBI had to shut these down while Clinton was still in office. Gorelick involved in this in any way?

[Lancey Howard]

Lamberth is erratic. He seems to be politically non-partisan but the more I read about him the more I have to conclude that he's arrogant with power. He's a goofball.

[McGavin999]

Now this is interesting. I wonder how this guy lives with himself?

[Peach]

Janet Reno reprimanded Resnick too:

In May 2002, the New York Times was retracing the steps leading up the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy. Times reporters made reference to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit and speculated after interviewing more than a dozen senior policy makers and law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, that “in the summer of 2001, the government’s counterterrorism apparatus was too lumbering, too compartmentalized and too inattentive to grasp the emerging pattern.” The New York Times continued that the FBI had been reluctant to pursue certain leads because one of their agents, Michael Resnick, was reprimanded by Attorney General Janet Reno for “filing misleading affidavits’ to the courts to try to obtain search warrants to eavesdrop on people “suspected of being foreign agents of international terrorists.” Resnick, who was working under the radical Fundamentalist Unit of the FBI, is described by the New York Times as the FBI supervisor in charge of coordinating the surveillance operations related to Hamas.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/April/3%20o/Asleep%20at%20the%20Wheel%20and%20Not%20Minding%20the%20Store%20By%20Michael%20Saba.htm

[Iowa Granny]

interesting.

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

I'm sorry, I'll have to get back to this discussion when I finish going through the roof with this proof of blatant Clintonian hypocricy.

[Nateman]

Isn't he the the same Lamberth who was helpful in the court cases against the Clinton gang? I seem to remember he sounded like one of the good guys in the bad old Clinton days.

[eyespysomething]

I know, I know. Its just so frustrating. They are so desperate to get out with a story showing President Bush in a bad light (this will get him impeached for sure this time!) they could not care less for America, or even take the extra week or so to actually so some research (it's called Google and its free!) so they can have the correct story and background. Heck, the NYTimes had a YEAR!

All I can say is thank God for the internet. Thank goodness for FR, and all the other truth seekers out there whose voices join together so everyone can hear us.

It reminds of Whoville in "Horton Hears a Who"

[Sam Hill]

Clinton is barely mentioned in the Newsweek article, except to claim that fighting terrorism was his number one priority, when it wasn't for Bush.

But here's a nicely ironic quote from near the end of the Newsweek piece -- the moral:

What Americans should be asking is why the Bush administration in its first eight months, like the Clinton administration for much of its eight years, did not demand the intelligence cooperation that was needed. At issue is not whom to blame for the past, but how to learn from it to safeguard our future.