NSA Whistleblowers on 60 Minutes: 9/11 Could Have Been Prevented

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and two other former NSA employees (Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe) gave stunning interviews on 60 Minutes last night.

In a hard-hitting, on-point report, they told Scott Pelley that NSA had technology---a program called ThinThread--that was ready to deploy in January 2001 and could have picked up critical intelligence prior to 9/11. NSA management rejected ThinThread, and embarked on a billion-dollar boondoggle, Trailblazer, a proposal designed figure how to do what ThinThread could do (collect and analyze massive amounts of data) on a massive and far more invasive scale. NSA also tossed ThinThread's privacy protections, leaving Americans vulnerable to illegal surveillance.

Drake called the failure to gather critical intelligence prior to 9/11

one of the great tragedies in the history of NSA

Here's the segment for those who missed it:

When Drake and the other whistleblowers went through proper channels to alert Congress and the Defense Department that the NSA was trading the nation's security for money at the expense of Americans' privacy, the government retaliated.

Drake is currently enduring the most severe whistleblower retaliation I have ever seen. He goes on trial June 13th for charges brought under the Espionage Act.

Tellingly, despite the damning evidence presented in the 60 Minutes report, the government's reply was deafening silence. NSA did not comment on the systematic breakdown, corruption, waste, and mismanagement that led it to discard a valuable intelligence tool in order to pay contractors billions on a funding-vehicle-disguised-as-a-legit-program that never got off the ground. The agency did not comment on the allegations of illegal domestic surveillance.

The Justice Department did not comment. Attorney General Eric Holder failed to explain why, despite Obama's campaign commitment to protect whistleblowers, the administration is using our criminal justice system and (to add insult to injury) the Espionage Act--a law meant to go after spies, not whistleblowers--to retaliate against a guy who just won the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. Or, why three complainants on an Inspector General complaint (Binney, Wiebe, and former congressional staffer Diane Roark, who also appeared on 60 Minutes) were subjected to armed FBI raids. Binney describes how the FBI burst into his home and

"pulled me out of the shower" while pointing a gun between his eyes.

Is this how we treat public servants who try to protect the country while obeying the law and trying to save taxpayer money?

That our government is using those tasked with enforcing the law-- the FBI and the Justice Department--in order to cover for government officials breaking the law is outrageous.

I explained the dangerous ramifications of using the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers in the 60 minutes"web extras":

I've chronicled the Drake case on Kos for over a year now. Last week, Drake was featured in Jane Mayer's must-read piece in The New Yorker, which sheds new light on Drake's case and the massive unconstitutional domestic surveillance NSA engaged in after 9/11.

Please support Thomas Drake by signing the petition demanding some desperately needed accountability for the retaliatory prosecution. You can also "like" the Save Tom Drake Facebook page.

Jesselyn Radack is Homeland Security & Human Rights Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower advocacy organization. This post originally appeared in her Daily Kos column.

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Old Atlantic makes this comment

Monday, 23 May 2011

The most likely link between Obama's life and a motive for harsh NSA prosecutions is Obama's employment
at University of Chicago which was for over 10 years. When Obama became a senator, U of C paid his wife 300k a year. So what would U of C have to hide that would involve NSA?

The primary issue for U of Chicago and NSA over history would be Russia. So what would we look for? U of Chicago has a link to the Los Alamos project, to Nobel Prize nominations for Russia in physics and economics, and to the economics professors involved in the IMF loans to Russia in the 1990's. The 1975 Nobel Prize nominations for a Russian and the IMF loans may be linked to similar pressure tactics against Paul Samuelson and others. Stanley Fischer started at U of C after MIT and had to apply for a work permit. Obama hired Larry Summers when he became president. Summers is part of a Harvard, MIT, Chicago connection in economics.

NSA may have turned up information on Russia using plagiarism by professors at U of Chicago, Harvard, MIT as well as Princeton, Cambridge England and elsewhere to pressure them. This seems to have started in the 1920's. You can read more at the link at my name.

So Obama may have been protecting U of C and Harvard. (Univ of California at Berkeley also may have substantial knowledge on these matters.) The Antitrust Division of the DOJ may know quite a bit about this. Joel Brenner was a trial lawyer in antitrust promoted by Bush to be head of counter intelligence. He said Russia was aiming its main effort not at technical know how but personal information and personal networks.

United States v. Harvard, Shleifer and Hay may be a related case.

The above represent comments on a public issue and are hypotheses or speculation. Please consult your local expert in Russia special methods and tactics before trying any cures.

Elias Davidsson makes this comment

What hero? Thomas Drake appears to me as attempting to reinforce the myth that Muslim terrorists (Al Qaeda) planned and executed 9/11, but that US intelligence did not intercept the signals.

Thomas Drake would, in my eyes, become a hero, if he would reveal how his colleagues participated in covering-up the crime and the role played by the real perpetrators, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Eberhart and Myers.

Mike makes this comment

It doesn't appear that technology was to blame for the NSA's conduct in the lead up to 9/11. James Bamford states that the problem was that Hayden failed to get FISA warrants or notify the FBI so they could get the warrants. If 9/11 was truly a massive intelligence failure then why did Hayden get to keep his job after 9/11? Why did he later receive lateral promotions to DDNI and CIA Director?

A related issue also reported by Bamford concerns the order given to FBI agents Miller and Rossini who were assigned to Alec Station in the lead up to 9/11. These agents were ordered to withhold the information about al-Mihdhar's US visa from the FBI. The reason for this order is still a state secret. When the FBI finally was told that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US in late August of '01 the UBLU (intelligence side Bin Laden unit) withheld this information from the USS Cole criminal side agents. The reason given for this withholding was the so called Wall. This explanation does not withstand scrutiny as the FBI intelligence analyst had in fact received approval from the NSLU and the NSA to share the information with the Cole investigators.

Three agencies with explanations for their pre-9/11 conduct that do not hold up. Yet the public was told that the solution was to give these agencies vast powers which they would use in good faith. Where was the good faith in the lead up to 9/11?

Quote:

Q: I'm a little unclear about the reason the NSA did not track suspects once they got into the U.S. You seem to say that they could have done so with a warrant issued by the FISA court. If that's true, have you been able to determine why NSA didn't do so? And why did General Hayden seem to imply that NSA could not track suspects in the U.S.?
James Meyer, Gurnee, Illinois

Bamford: NSA eavesdropped on the two terrorists, al Mihdhar and al Hazmi, by targeting bin Laden's ops center in Yemen. The two called the house often—al Midhar's wife and new-born daughter lived there, and the owner of the house, Ahmed al Hada, who also lived there, was al Mihdhar's father-in-law. NSA's technology would have shown that the calls were coming from and going to various U.S. area codes. Given that, NSA should have obtained a FISA warrant to target all their international calls and, had they passed the information on to the FBI, they could have obtained a FISA warrant to tap into their domestic-to-domestic calls.

NSA has never addressed why they refused to do this. It may have been because Gen. Hayden was overly concerned about being accused of illegal domestic eavesdropping, even though it would have been perfectly legal if he simply obtained a warrant from the FISA court. The court would have certainly approved the warrant. Out of more than 20,000 applications over about 30 years, the court has approved all but about three.

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DR: NSA has long had all these relationships with the telecommunications companies, as well. One thing that confused me: Before 9/11, while Hayden was supposedly fighting against any eavesdropping on Americans, you write, the NSA was trying to convince one telecom, Qwest Communications, to help the agency conduct domestic surveillance. Those two don’t fit.

JB: It would’ve been nice if everything fit into a nice little package, but it didn’t. That was one of the outlying issues. The time line seemed to be off. You know, I could see [Hayden] doing that after 9/11, but before 9/11 he was very careful. It’s hard to say. Again, I’m just one guy trying to write this book. But that’s why there really needs to be a congressional investigation into what went on at NSA.

The only thing I can think of is that [Hayden] may not have been trying to get access to the actual voice conversations. What he may have been trying to get from Qwest was their database of subscribers —
subscriber names, subscriber telephone numbers. It’s one of the things that NSA has always tried to get. I mean, going back to the early days, they had the world’s largest collection of telephone books.

Hayden would’ve known that was at least questionable, if not illegal, because I think he made a comment about that very kind of access before 9/11.

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Colin Bryant makes this comment

The feeling I am getting is that the United States of America, a great democracy, is morphing into The Fascist States of America. I hope I am proved wrong.

Tom makes this comment

Drake's my hero! I couldn't sleep at night either knowing crimes against Americans could be prevented. Egos and greed run rampant in Washington, and unless we get term limits in Congress, American taxpayers will never get a system that works in their best interest...Today's congress gave the NSA a slap on the wrist, 5 year probation, where a CONGRESS working for taxpayers would have fired the top dog, and sued for compensation for the 1.2 billion that blowhard wasted. Its all about money, and term limits would get the money out of Congress...Civil Servants, not career politicians....Term limits are a must....Make lobbiests work harder to obtain their secret alliances in congress...revolve the door....transparency...democracy...its what makes us different/special...china can do capitalism better, but they will never be able to do democracy...

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NSA Whistleblowers on 60 Minutes: 9/11 Could Have Been Prevented

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