Echelon spy network would have intercepted, catalogued all transmissions
During a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Thursday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey tacitly admitted that the U.S. government intercepted a call about 9/11 - before 9/11.
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, "we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mukasey is then reported to have "grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. "We got three thousand. . . . We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that," he said, struggling to maintain his composure."
Despite Mukasey using the example to justify warrantless wiretapping of Americans by claiming the government was unable to intercept the call, the fact is that no law would have prevented the government from listening in on the call. Existing FISA provisions would have covered the interception of the call.
In addition, it would be naive to consider that Echelon - the global spy network run by the NSA - did not intercept and catalogue the call. In 1999, the Australian government admitted that they were part of an NSA-led global intercept and surveillance grid in alliance with the US and Britain that could listen to "every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission," on the planet.
Furthermore, two days after 9/11, Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the Echelon spy network had provided warnings of the terror attack 6 months in advance.
It is admitted that the CIA had tracked the alleged hijackers to an Al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 and then let them back into the US. The U.S. government was fully aware of their movements without the need for a phone tap and allowed them safe passage around the globe.
As Newsweek reported, five of the named hijackers "received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s".
Under these circumstances, the contention that the U.S. government intercepted such a call but was unable or unwilling to listen to it due to legal restrictions is completely inconceivable.
Mukasey’s admission is therefore further evidence that the U.S. government was responsible for - at the very bare minimum - "malfeasant complicity in the 9/11 attacks," as Keith Olbermann stated on his MSNBC show yesterday.
Olbermann thinks it likely Mukasey is simply embellishing in order to propagandize for warrantless wiretapping, but the fact that the hijackers were carefully tracked every step of the way before 9/11 by the U.S. government and indeed trained at their military installations, in addition to Echelon having recorded phone conversations about 9/11 six months before the attack, strongly suggests that Mukasey unintentionally told the truth - and unequivocally let slip U.S. government foreknowledge of 9/11.
