No one in Congress ever cared, then, after 911, or now.
Instead, also ignored, like the Cole terrorist releases is:
“Army Major (Hasan) Played Role in Presidential (Obama) Transition”
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.
My comment concerns the difficulty in finally nailing down the article on the internet. My computer locked up twice and two windows popped up stating that the computer had locked up due to a virus infestation. It would appear as though this article had been mysteriously hacked and that one wasn't supposed to have access.
Everyone knew this was coming.
The Islamic terrorists had a calendar which showed
the upcoming attack.
Those who knew did NOTHING, but cheer as 3000 were
slaughtered.
No one in Congress ever cared, then, after 911, or now.
Instead, also ignored, like the Cole terrorist releases is:
“Army Major (Hasan) Played Role in Presidential (Obama) Transition”
The cancellation of this program happened quite a few months into GWB’s administration. Maybe the buck stops there.
Interesting that the article is difficult to access.
Perhaps the left has figured out how to prevent the dissemination of news detrimental to their cause.
“””””Though Binney and a number of others left the NSA when it instituted the illegal wiretap program, “”””
Is he saying 9/11 would have been prevented if the government was able to tap all our phones illegally?
If Clinton would have taken care of bin laden when he attacked the towers in 1993 then none of this would be necessary.
Most of the idiots in the country are led to believe that 9/11 was the first attack by terrorists on American soil. Hildabeast should be asked about this extensively. All that happened when she was co-president Billary.
It was during the Reagan and GHWB years that the permanent bureaucracy started doing their own thing. I suspect leftovers from Carter years, but by the time Jamie Gorelick went out of her way to block intelligence agency crosstalk, that leftists decided that they could operate no matter who was president.
Conspiracies? Yep, but not involving the higher ups ... until the higher ups agree with the permanent bureaucracy.
Yep. Al queda attacked the WTC, our embassies, a navy ship and more between 1993 and 2000. All on clinton’s watch. One hit during Bushs term and they we took major action. Tired of the Bush bashing on this issue.
lest we forget Gorelick's WALL! In 1995, while America’s intelligence agencies were still investigating al Qaeda's 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, the Clinton administration strengthened FISA to a degree that was unprecedented. Specifically, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick called for increased restrictions on information-sharing between intelligence (CIA) and law-enforcement (FBI) agencies. In a 1995 memo to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, titled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,” Gorelick wrote the following:

“We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”
It should be noted that when Gorelick penned the aforementioned memo, President Clinton was extremely worried about ongoing FBI and CIA investigations into illegal Chinese contributions that had been made to his presidential campaign. Both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese, and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. It was also a period when the FBI had begun to systematically investigate weapons-technology theft by foreign powers, most notably Russia and China. Had FBI agents been able to confirm China's theft of such technology -- or its transfer of that technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria -- Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react (and to thereby jeopardize the future flow of Chinese money into his political coffers).
Gorelick's 1995 memo emphasized Presidential Decision Directive 24 (PDD 24), which Clinton had signed the previous year. PDD 24 placed intelligence-gathering under the direct control of the President’s National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to stifle information-sharing and cooperation between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, such information-sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare over which the President himself had final authority. Consequently, information lethal to Clinton and the Democratic Party languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind PDD 24 and Gorelick’s “wall.”
And let’s not let the masses forget that Billary was dropping Tomahawk missiles on Baghdad in June of 1993. I lost count of how many times Billary bombed Iraq after that. And I believe it was Billary who signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that says US policy shall be to remove Saddam from power.
Monday morning quarterbacking, the search for silver bullet solutions, blaming “greed,” paranoia, it never ends.
I think Bill Clinton had both reason and opportunity to stop Bin Laden. I don’t press this point because it too is Monday morning quarterbacking. Had he acted at the time, I might have said “Bin who?”
I think there are solutions we can pursue that will work. I’m skeptical of supposedly non-intrusive, highly effective computer programs that none of us can understand.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI might or might not have prevented 9/11, but it surely would have stopped a lot of subsequent terrorist attacks. Here are some comprehensible things that I think he would do, that we should do.
Clean up the FBI. The Muslim FBI agent who wouldn’t interrogate a Muslim as a matter of principle is just one agent who would have to go. Second, hire and train agents to infiltrate mosques, which is where a lot recruitment and inflammatory sermons take place. Third, quick deportations of those espousing Jihad.
I’m sure there are many other common sense solutions that would contribute to success. Once you have a police force you can trust, give them your support and let them do their job.
Contrary to liberal politically correct thinking of the Obama administration, the threat of domestic (or foreign-based) terrorism is not uniform. The threat comes from Muslims. Recording our keystrokes does nothing to combat Islamic terrorism.
Indeed. My firm belief is that Jaime Gorelick is responsible for 9/11
Here’s an interesting bit: From News Max):
Friday, Aug. 12, 2005 11:14 a.m. EDT
Clinton Lawyers: Mohamed Atta Off-Limits
A year before the 9/11 attacks, Clinton administration lawyers told a group of military intelligence officers that information they had developed on 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta could not be shared with the FBI, saying of Atta himself: “You can’t even touch him - it doesn’t matter what information you have.”
“If Clinton would have taken care of bin laden when he attacked the towers in 1993 then none of this would be necessary.”
If Clinton had focused on his job as Commander-in-Chief, he would have stopped a lot of this cold. Unfortunately, many Americans would have considered him a do-nothing President obsessed with addressing a non-existent threat.
The problem, IMO, is with the American people. We want a President who will do it all. Bush, whom I consider better than Clinton or Obama, wanted to be the “education President.” Few objected.
As you said, the problem is that most of the US citizens are truly clueless. They believe whatever they hear on Letterman, Daily Show or Saturday Night Live as fact.
ThinThread or Trailblazer probably work well if you know the results and look backwards to find the clues. The problem with mass intel gathering has always been sifting the huge volume of chaff in real time to find a little wheat BEFORE the fact. Might there have been shenanigans and venal considerations with contracts? Sure. Could a transition to a new system, or weaknesses in the new system itself, have created extra vulnerabilities? Quite possibly.
But going by what this article says, the whistleblower’s ThinThread program was replaced a month before 9-11. So it failed to detect (or at least to cause action on) a year+ of plotting, preparation, flight schools, foreign telecommunications, funding, and possibly connections to Saudi officials, etc., but would have miraculously stopped 9-11 in it’s final weeks? And the evidence is that after 9-11, they could use the system to work backwards and predict the past. We should apply this to stock selection and PowerBall numbers; we’ll all be RICH!
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