"The US Director of National Intelligence asserts that the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, were caused by weak domestic wiretapping laws," David Edwards and Mike Sheehan write for Raw Story. "Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, former head of the National Security Agency who was appointed DNI in 2007 by President Bush, spoke today to a group of students in St. Mary's City, Missouri, about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a federal statute that outlines procedures for electronic surveillance by the US intelligence community."
According to McConnell, "alleged 9/11 conspirator Mohamed Atta" was able to pull of his dastardly deed because he was "invisible to your intelligence" after he entered the United States. "He's now a US person," said McConnell, with all the rights and privileges of ordinary American citizens.
Inside the US, McConnell continued, Atta would be "invisible to your intelligence community. As long he doesn't break the law, law enforcement can't conduct surveillance, [because] they don't have probable cause."
Terror network al-Qaeda understood that, McConnell then said, "and that's why 9/11 happened, in my view."
Sure, and big fat chartreuse raspberries grow on the dark side of the Moon.
In fact, the NSA has snooped the American public at large for decades now. Mr. McConnell needs to find a computer and do a Google search of the word SHAMROCK. It was a massive snoop program predating the NSA, created by Truman in 1952. SHAMROCK snooped all telegraph data entering and leaving the country. It was done with the help of RCA Global, ITT World Communications, and Western Union International.
And then there is ECHELON, the snoop system that captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. It was first reported in 1988 and was investigated by a committee of the European Parliament.
Of course, this snoop technology was only used on guys in distant and remote caves. Once they entered the United States, they were protected by the Constitution.
And angels dance on the head of a pin.
Either Mr. McConnell is an idiot or an accomplished liar. Suffice it to say idiots are not appointed to oversee the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, NRO, etc. ad nauseam, a virtual alphabet soup of "intelligence" agencies.
Mohamed Atta attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, a fact reported by the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Knight Ridder newspapers, although of course this uncomfortable bit of information was soon enough relegated to the memory hole. Supposed hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari attended the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in Texas, and Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California.
And then there was Able Danger. "Now, almost exactly four years after 9/11, the facts appear to have been turned upside down," Dr. Daniele Ganser wrote for ISN Security Watch in August, 2005. "We now learn that Atta was also connected to a top secret operation of the Pentagon's Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the US. According to Army reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger had identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks." In fact, so central was Atta to Able Danger, his picture graced a chart at SOCOM headquarters.
According to the German newspaper Die Zeit, Mohamed Atta and his U.S. military base trained accomplices were followed around by the Mossad's "Israeli art students" and the CIA. Ramzi Binalshibh "led the CIA to Atta, who was then followed to the States," writes Jack Riddler. "Did the surveillance of Atta continue once he was in the States? Technically, the CIA would have been required to cease the surveillance and pass the information on to the FBI, since the law before Sept. 11 banned CIA domestic operations. Of course, that law has most often been honored in the breach."
In other words, Mike McConnell takes you for an idiot. As head honcho of the snoop and subversion infrastructure, McConnell knows all about Mohamed Atta and his fellow intel operatives. He's playing you for a fool.
But then many of us are fools, or at least witless chumps, too distracted to be bothered. After all, there is no need for such information, not when we can become insta-voyeurs, watching Britney Spears shopping for a pregnancy test at a California Rite Aid store.
It is of little concern guys like McConnell are sharpening their knives and preparing to deal a death blow to the Constitution.
