miserable wretch should be skinned alive... the set on fire! or vise versa
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.
I seem to recall that one of the players, perhaps Ramzi Yousef, was (or had been) a member of Hussein’s intelligence agency.
Most people involved have since recanted their stories that Able Danger identified two of the 9/11 hijackers, but now that we see how the Democrats coerce conformity to the accepted story, I'm not sure that Able Danger was the miss that Clinton Democrats needed it to be.
-PJ
bkmk
Hmmmm. If only he had related some of that in that (stupid as he was) phone call he made just before he left the USA.
Now, one of their guys shot the Rabbi in 1996(?). I used to have their names memorized but only Yousef and Mahmoud Abouhalima come to mind this afternoon on short notice.
I do remember that Holy Land Foundation was an unindicted co-conspirator of sorts with Sami Al-Arian. I think he had a local cable show in Florida called “Peace Be Upon You” or some other sort of islamic nonsense.
Rabbi Kahane in NYC.
Thank you for that. An important piece of news, should not be forgotten.
Nice revisionist history. Clinton didn’t do a damn thing to slow down Al Queda. It’s 100% on his watch. Bush didn’t even have his leadership confirmed until well into 2001, much less. 9/11 is only different because the results were far worse than the same exact building being bombed from underneath 8 years previous. Al Queda grew stronger and stronger between 1993 and 2001 and nothing would have changed that. The effort of assisting the northern alliance was the correct approach. without question. On one hand you are saying we shouldn’t do anything in Iraq. On the other hand you are saying we didn’t do enough in Afghanistan . NO ONE EVER, EVER, EVER said we went in to Iraq because they did 9/11. That’s Moonbat stupidity to repeat that now among the right. After 9/11, the mission was (and should still be) to root out any leaders funding and promoting terror. Saddam was. He was a massive destabilizing force, having refused to abide by his agreed surrender terms and continuing to pay for suicide bombers in Israel. He was not Al Queda, but our efforts were not exclisive to Al Queda. Your attacks on Bush are an attack on our military who drew up plans to best prosecute the war.
I have no answer on Saudi’s role, but that’s not Bush. There is a bigger reason that goes way beyond one person. I have no clue why they are a protected class among those countries.
It is utterly shocking we’re debating this on FR and with 180 degree opposite view as the past 15 years. Embarrassingly shocking.
B T T T
miserable wretch should be skinned alive... the set on fire! or vise versa
I would opt for BOTH.
100%
The guy who supposedly outed curveball as “unreliable” was Tyler Drumheller, a partner of Hillary’s personal intel supplier, Sid Blumenthal. Tyler was fed his info on Curveball by the Germans, who at the time were busting Iraq sanctions.
Tyler later fed info on Libya he obtained from ? to Sid Blumenthal, who passed Tyler’s reports to Hillary Clinton via her non-gov email. That Libyan intel, prior to Benghazi, must have been some high quality stuff./s
The big problem with the Curveball situation was that a massive conclusion was drawn essentially from the hearsay claims of a single source. This speaks of an intent to produce a particular on-paper outcome whether or not it was at variance with reality, and not of a search for valid intelligence.
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