PBS Confirms that NSA Could Have Prevented 9/11

PBS is about to confirm this.

Raw Story summarizes the PBS revelations:

Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, and found that it had been closely monitoring the 9/11 hijackers as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin Laden’s operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped bin Laden’s satellite phone, starting in 1996.

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PBS also found that “the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into NSA’s role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and the FBI.”

In a review of Bamford’s book, former senator and 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey wrote, “As the 9/11 Commission later established, U.S. intelligence officials knew that al-Qaeda had held a planning meeting in Malaysia, found out the names of two recruits who had been present — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — and suspected that one and maybe both of them had flown to Los Angeles. Bamford reveals that the NSA had been eavesdropping for months on their calls to Yemen, yet the agency ‘never made the effort’ to trace where the calls originated. ‘At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds.’”

There is little doubt intelligence was mishandled.

The question is why?

Some of course believe it was deliberately mishandled in order to justify the government instituting the Patriot Act. This might not be so far out. Intelligence agencies in the US have been jonesing for broader powers of surveillance for some time.

Or was it simply case of bad communication within a large agency?

Or was it something far more sinister?

It wasn't just the patriot acts I & II, it was the John Warner Defense Authorization act, the Homegrown Terror prevention act and it was also used as a pretext for wars.

There are just to many things that went on that day to have me believe that there isn't an inside job element to 9/11.

The simple fact that Norad was running drills of highjacked planes flying into buildings on 9/11, confusing controllers makes me raise my eyebrows. The fact that Transportation Sec. Norman Mineta went in and testified that while Bush was being torn away from My Pet Goat, Cheney was in the White House bunker ordering Norad to stand down.
If you want another eye raising experience, google Willie Rodriguez, see what the head janitor, the guy with the master keys of the WTC complex has to say... and then ask yourself why his testimony was done and then not included in the 9/11 commission report fable.

You forgot the Military Commissions Act

LOL.

All in all, I would say when it comes to 9/11, the American people as a whole have been had.