she was part of the 9/11 commission that investigated herself, among other potential terrorists. and there it is
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.
“Please, saying the future should have been known a dozen years past this catastrophic mass murder is preposterous. How bout placing the blame on the Muslims instead of denigrating Americans.”
That is so sensible, it receives no response.
To act upon the information would have been deemed to be racist and profiling.
What you lack there is any sort of real evidence of a direct connection - evidence we DO have about the Saudis.
It being 2016, it’s time to come to grips with a few things that weren’t so apparent in 2005. Among these things is that we went into Iraq on the basis of deliberately false information supplied by the Bush administration, and we have no certain boundary on the lengths to which information supplied to us has been altered to this end. Also among these things is the deep involvement of Saudi royals in the 9/11 attacks.
James Woods alerted the FBI to one of the dry run flights a month before the attack and there was no action. The FBI didn’t confirm they were among the terrorists but Woods has said that at least 2 of those on 9-11-2001 were also on his flight.
Sibel Edmonds (theboilingfrog.com) worked for the FBI as a translator of Iranian and Turkish languages. She read an Iranian warning to the US of eminent attacks that was ignored by the US.
Edward Snowden has released much of what William Binney had already released, which is why many people think Snowden was setup by the NSA.
“What you lack there is any sort of real evidence of a direct connection - evidence we DO have about the Saudis.”
And what you’ve offered is opinion and attitude - nothing.
“we went into Iraq on the basis of deliberately false information supplied by the Bush administration”
Yeah of heard those claims. But since you’ve offered nothing but conclusion, I’ll help.
Wilson - Bush lied when he truthfully said that British intelligence indicated Saddam was trying to buy uranium from an African country.
And/or, it was all about Bush claims about stockpiles of WMDs. In truth, that was only one of the reasons, both for President Bush and President Clinton.
This particular article doesn't say exactly when Drake ran the comparison, but if you read Drake's biography on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake), it was likely to be back in 2002, when the Inspector General was investigating the replacement system.
The issue is being resurrected now precisely because it worked, without the violations of privacy that have been committed since then. Congress is considering legislation to reauthorize the funding for systems that replaced it.
But, as I posted earlier: this kind of testing is an absolute requirement for data analysis and mining systems. If it doesn't identify known events, you can't rely on it to identify unknown events.
An addenda: read the sections about Drake's prosecution under the Espionage Act. Consider what he was accused of doing, and what a certain Presidential candidate has done.
she was part of the 9/11 commission that investigated herself, among other potential terrorists. and there it is
100%... how convenient
I hope the links stil work.
Public Law 105-338 The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998:
This should give you a link to the text of the law, well worth keeping.
Public Law 107-243 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002:
Wow you’re still buried deep in WoT propaganda, eh?
Not sure what I can do for you if you’re not willing to inform yourself of easily accessible information, such as Powell’s key presentation to the UN on Iraqi WMD - the primary stated justification for the invasion - being completely false and based off a single, unreliable source code-named “Curveball” (as if that wasn’t enough of a tip-off that the truth wasn’t being told).
If this weren’t coming from Salon I might read it.
Powell’s testimony on the mobile-bio labs?
They were examined after the war. My recollection is that the DIA had one opinion, the CIA a contrary opinion. The press simply chose one to report as fact.
Corrected link!
Public Law 105-338 The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998:
Don’t you think it would be responsible to sort out that difference of opinion before committing to a major war, killing over a million people, destabilizing the entire Middle East, and spending trillions of dollars doing it?
Indeed. And further, the idea that ONE system in the many hundreds and thousands in the Intelligence Community would be the silver bullet is absurd.
Anyone who thinks Snowden should have simply reported this to his chain of command or to congress in some whistleblower program needs to read about Binney and what happened to him when he tried that.
Snowden watched and learned a lesson.
The bottom line is that the NSA cannot be trusted in its mission. Instead of doing its job, it is obsessed with gathering unlimited power to surveille and collect mountains of useless data. Note that while spending all this money and effort to collect crap, they are ignoring the important stuff.
This is inefficient.
Compounding this is their perpetual *excuse* that they *could* have been doing their job if they just had more power to do so.
This is the same problem found in totalitarian regimes, like East Germany. Their entire government had given up on the important things that government is supposed to do. Instead they concentrated on nit-picking and spying on their own people. This is a death sentence to a government, that is, a government that inefficient is destined to fall.
Right now, the US has 16 *major* intelligence agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community
Some are more efficient, some are less so. And some have so completely gone “off the reservation” that they need an extensive restructuring and mission limitations to return to doing what they are supposed to be doing; not just lobbying for more and more voyeuristic power.
You remind me of the poster on another thread and website who “educated” me that the Soviet Union was neither socialist, nor communist but represented “state capitalism.” Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Chavez are capitalists by the modern interpretation.
Perhaps you are of the school of thought that cold polar vortexes are proof of global warming.
I've wasted enough time on you. You are incapable of learning.
““””””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?”
No, he left because it was an illegal domestic wiretap operation. He was saying that a targeted and legal program, thinthread would have prevented 9/11.
Essentially thinthread was profiling, targeting terrorists and using their legally obtained metadata to find them. The NSA went with wide net and decided it would be better to collect everything, on everybody. More illegal, less effective.
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