NSA Surveillance of 9/11 Plot Was Known to FBI
Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller made a startling claim yesterday to a Congressional Committee overseeing the NSA inquiry. The Director described how Khalid al-Midhar, one of the 9-11 hijackers, had called a Yemeni safe house from a phone in San Diego shortly before the attack. Mueller claims had today's surveillance system been in place, NSA surveillance of that call would have led to sharing of intelligence with the FBI and "derailed" the 9/11 attack. http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
That isn't the complete truth, however. Court records from the trial of convicted co-conspiractor Zakaria Moussaoui shows the FBI was aware of NSA intercepts of Midhar and and his partner Nawaf al-Hazmi in the months leading up to 9/11, who went on to hijack Flt. 77 that slammed into the Pentagon. The pair had also met with the other principal 9/11 hijackers at various locations inside the US. Based in part on NSA wiretaps that were later withheld and suppressed, FBI agents had, in fact, located the pair inside the US in mid-2001, but the investigating agents were ordered to close the file after CIA refused to cooperate and pressured the Bureau to shut down several lines of field investigation that were focusing on the plotters.
Mueller's claims omit those key facts. The Director instead stated that Khalid al-Mihdhar was being monitored by intelligence agencies, but “they lost track of him,” Mueller said. http://www.csmonitor.com/...
FBI Director Mueller doesn't explain why. He instead told Congress that intelligence officials did not know that it was Midhar who called a Yemen safehouse to discuss progress of the plot. The NSA monitoring program could have changed that, Mueller argued, potentially leading to the "derailing" of the plot. In fact, the FBI field investigators had already tried to get CIA to reveal the NSA surveillance records they knew already existed, but that line of investigation was shut down by headquarters. Mueller's statement is completely misleading in view of the actual events and decisions taken by ranking intelligence officials to sidetrack ongoing FBI investigations into the al-Qaeda operation during 2001:
“If we had the telephone number from Yemen, we would have matched it up to that telephone number in San Diego, got further legal process, identified al-Mihdhar,” he said. “The 9/11 Commission itself indicated that investigations or interrogations of al-Mihdhar once he was identified could have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot.”
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Moussaoui Court Records Show CIA Suppression of Ongoing FBI Investigation
http://landing.newsinc.com/...
We've learned a great deal about 9/11 that confirmed earlier information that points to sabotage of FBI field investigations of the 9/11 hijackers known by both CIA and FBI to be inside the U.S. We also see a chain of malfeasance and dereliction of duty that reaches up into the White House in the handling of the known threat presented by the presence of the soon to be Flt.-77 hijacker, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and his long-time partner, Khalid al-Midhar.
The following summary also sheds light on the role that previously unpublicized NSA surveillance had, and how willful misinterpretation of FISA requirements led to FBI surveillance of the Flt. 77 plot being shut down. The "DE" references, below, refer to specific Defense Exhibits in the Moussaoui trial.
(Note: Much of what we now know about the 9/11 plot the material introduced by the defense. http://www.salon.com/...)
DE #939 entered into the Moussaoui trial on March 11, 2006: email from former CIA Deputy Chief of the CIA Bin Laden unit , Tom Wilshire, back to his CIA CTC managers, Richard Blee, Head of the CIA Bin Laden unit, Cofer Black head of the CIA CTC unit and likely George Tenet, on July 23, 2001. This email said that Khalid al-Mihdhar would be found at the point of the next big al Qaeda attack. Wilshire in the DOJ IG report had also already stated in his July 5, 2001 email back to his CIA CTC managers that he thought the people at the Kuala Lumpur meeting were connected to the warnings the CIA and FBI had been receiving since April 2001 of a huge al Qaeda attack aimed at the United States. These people would have been Mihdhar and Hazmi. Wilshire, as did the CIA already knew Hazmi had a US visa and was inside of the US, and knew Mihdhar had a US multi-entry visa.
According DE 939, Wilshire was not given permission to his two requests on July 13, 2001, and July 23, 2001 to turn the information on Kuala Lumpur meeting over to the FBI Cole bombing investigators (O'Neill's unit), even though his CIA managers, Richard Blee and Cofer Black along with George Tenet were holding an urgent meeting on July 10, 2001 with Rice and Clark in the White house warning Rice and Clark that the al Qaeda terrorists were planning an attack inside of the US that would kill thousands of Americans. see State of Denial by Bob Woodward. On July 17, Blee, Black and Tenet gave the same warning to Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld. Whatever the warning, Ashcroft quite flying commercial aircraft on AJ business on July 26, 2001 due to some still unexplained threat from the FBI?
Less than one month after his July 23, 2001 email back to Blee and Black indicating that Mihdhar would be found at the location of the next big al Qaeda attack, on August 22, 2001 FBI Agent Margret Gillespie, aka Mary, working at the CIA Bin Laden unit tells FBI HQ Agent Dina Corsi and CIA officer Tom Wilshire, working at that time as the FBI ITOS Deputy Chief, that the INS had discovered both Mihdhar and Hazmi inside of the US. It is clear that Wilshire and most likely Corsi know that that point that both Mihdhar and Hazmi are inside of the US to take part in the al Qaeda attack they are aware of that will kill thousands of Americans. It is clear that . . . they work together to shut down the only investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi that could have prevented this attack. See description of DE 061/062 below.
On August 23, 2001 Gillespie had the CIA Bin Laden unit send out an alert for Mihdhar and Hazmi, and indicated that these al Qaeda terrorists are inside of the US. At that point anyone at the CIA who had received Wilshire’s July 23, 2001 and July 5, 2001 email, or who were aware of the massive warnings of an al Qaeda attack inside of the US would also know that al Qaeda terrorists Mihdhar and Hazmi were inside of the US to carry out the al Qaeda attacks the CIA and FBI HQ had been warned about since April 2001.
See the following webs sites; http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/... and www.eventson911.com.
In addition to DE 939, the most chilling of these is DE-0681 and DE 0682. In DE 681/682, FBI HQ IOS Agent Dina Corsi tells Bongardt on August 28, 2001, that he and his team must shut down any investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi because the information came from intelligence through the NSA. But on August 27, 2001 the day before, the NSA had already given Corsi written permission to give all of this NSA information to the criminal investigators on the Cole bombing investigation, see DE-0448 for this actual release from the NSA. (See, link: "NSA approves sharing info" at http://prior-knowledge-of-9-11.blogspot.com/... )
Corsi also tells Bongardt on August 29, 2001 that a FBI National Security Legal Unit (NSLU) attorney had ruled that Bongardt and his team could have no part in the investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi but per Sherry Sabol’s testimony to DOJ IG investigators, on November 7, 2002, in the DOJ IG report, it is clear that Sabol, the NSLU attorney Corsi had contacted, had ruled in fact just the opposite and had ruled that Bongardt and his team could be part of any investigation and search for of Mihdhar since the NSA information had no connection to any FISA warrant.
This was the exact argument that FBI Agent Steve Bongardt had raised when he asked Corsi on August 28, 2001 to get a legal ruling from the NSLU, the FBI legal unit, to see if he could investigate and search for Mihdhar and Hazmi. Bongardt even tells Corsi on August 29, 2001 as she is shutting down his investigation, that these terrorists are inside of the US to carry out yet another horrific al Qaeda terrorist attack, and people will die because of this ruling. See testimony of Sherry Sabol, aka Sherry S. 9/11 Commission report page 538, footnote 81.
Corsi also never tells Bongardt as she is shutting down his investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi that she is aware that the CIA had been deliberately hiding the photograph of Walid Bin Attash, mastermind of the Cole bombing, taken at Kuala Lumpur, from him and his Cole bombing investigating team, a photograph that directly connects both Mihdhar and Hazmi, who were at the same meeting, to the planning of the Cole bombing, see page 302 DOJ IG report. http://forums.randi.org/...
CIA Ordered FBI Warning Cable Withheld - 9/11 Attacks Could Have Been Thwarted in Jan. 2000
On January 15, 2000, Flt. 77 hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Nidhar landed at LA Int'l Airport after attending an al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur. According to testimony given by CIA Director Tenet to the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry, the CIA and a dozen allied agencies had that meeting under intensive surveillance. Shortly thereafter, an FBI liaison officer in the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center drafted a warning cable about the arrival in the US of the pair, but never sent it.
Why? She was ordered to withhold it by the CIA-CTC Assistant Director.
If that cable had been sent, the presence of the Flt. 77 hijackers and the other 9/11 attack groups would have been known to a much wider group of FBI agents and offices, including John P. O'Neill's I-95 anti-terrorism unit in New York, who would have immediately understood the significance, and ordered both human surveillance and FISA warrant coverage, which would have certainly been granted under the law then in place. Contrary to the testimony yesterday given by Director Mueller, FISA law as it existed before the Patriot Act would have allowed the FBI access to any electronic surveillance of al-Hazmi and al-Midhar, who were foreign nationals and known terrorists. Units of the FBI did obtain access to some of the NSA "take", but under pressure from CIA, these investigators were denied use of this intelligence and access to further electronic coverage.
Here's what the Wiki page for O'Neill says about that:
In 1999, O'Neill sent a close associate named Mark Rossini to work in CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station in Virginia. He had a conflict with station chief Richard Blee; O'Neill wanted Rossini to stay at station and feed him information about what the CIA was doing, while Blee wanted him out working in the field. Later on, the CIA Bin Ladin station learned that Bin-Ladin associates Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were headed to the US with Visas. Rossini and his associate Doug Miller attempted to alert O'Neill but the message was blocked by Blee. Mihdhar and Hazmi became two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11.
