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.
In 1995, while Americas 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:â¨
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 Presidents 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 Gorelicks wall.
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.
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!
A much simpler program would’ve prevented 9/11:
Pursuing expired Visas.
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.
Keeping all those Clintonistas and making nice has worked out so well for the “compassionate conservative”.
several federal agencies/branches of government reported that the Clinton budget cuts caused many security programs to be shut down. it can be found on the 9/11 report that most of the findings have been released to the public.
One of NSA’s main problems is simply too much data and no good way to search and correlate it all.
Case in point: back in the 60’s two Russian generals made a long distance phone call via their troposphere scatter system one said to the other a numerical reference which was to a frame number in their public TV broadcast - the frame in question had classified diagrams on their space program.
So for years we listened to and recorded private Russian phone calls hoping for the same thing to happen again. But as there was so much of it most was never actually listened to - so the resulting tapes were (and likely still are) stored in some NSA warehouse never searched and never listened to because it would take centuries to go through all of it..
bush’s fault..
It seems doubtful that security at the NSA is so bad that they let in anyone with a janitor disguise.
ASA Vet ping
Will there be enough lead to plug the leaks before the dam breaks?
History says "Yes!" but then, who writes history?
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.
...
Bush and Clinton cronies.
At no point in history has any government ever wanted its people to be defenseless for any good reason ~ nully's son
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