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.
A much simpler program would’ve prevented 9/11:
Pursuing expired Visas.
Except perhaps for Bill Clinton, presidents lately have not come across as resourceful people who think for themselves and get independent council. They seem hand-picked for willingness to bow to the preset agenda. That's why anyone outside the parameters (both political parties) gets marginalized.
Bottom line....I can't think of anything that disproves your theory.
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”.
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.””
The idea is to always blame Americans and the sad part is, some Americans believe it.
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..
See my post at 17 - It was not possible to pursue Mohammad Atta on any grounds.
It seems doubtful that security at the NSA is so bad that they let in anyone with a janitor disguise.
Well said. I’d still like to know what Sandy Berger removed from the archives to protect the boss. While we’re at it cleaning the FBI, NSA and CIA have housecleaning to do as well.
ASA Vet ping
lemme guess.. Hillary was against any elimination of spying programs too...
There you go. Not every problem has a simple solution, but many do.
> Is it so far fetched to think the commercial aircraft in Sal Pak (outside Bagdad) were used to train hijackers and some of these were among the 9/11 terrorists? Saddam claimed credit for the 9/11 attacks. Maybe it was true.
Yes, not only is it completely far-fetched, it is outright false, and in 2016 you should smack yourself for still being of a mind to pin 9/11 on Hussein. The Salman Pak plane is the same thing we do here to train emergency personnel, its existence implies nothing else.
9/11 was done by the Saudis, perhaps with the cooperation of the Bush administration. That latter point remains unsettled.
Will there be enough lead to plug the leaks before the dam breaks?
History says "Yes!" but then, who writes history?
Actually, your post 17 refers to the inability to share intel on any grounds at that time due to the Gorelick wall, not any kind of diplomatic protection.
Similarly, if NSA snoops something illegal on you, they can’t give it to the cops to go nab you.
But it doesn’t stop the cops from finding out on their own that you’re up to no good and going after you.
So lack of intel sharing doesn’t stop INS from pursuing expired visas and forwarding their own case to the FBI if they think there’s more going on there than an inattentive student.
100%, as much as any one person can be
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