Judge Tosses NSA Spy Cases
By David Kravets | January 22, 2010 | 2:27 pm

A federal judge is dismissing lawsuits accusing the government of teaming with the nation’s telcos to funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision was a major blow to the two suits testing warrantless eavesdropping and executive branch powers implemented following the 2001 terror attacks. The San Francisco judge said the courts are not available to the public to mount that challenge.

“A citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have the government follow the law,” (.pdf) Walker ruled late Thursday.

12-31-09 revised 7-12-10

Summary and Analysis of "National Security Alert" by Chris Sarns

Like many others I was impressed with the Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) video "National Security Alert" (NSA) when I saw it for the first time. I thought that the unanimous testimony of the witnesses confirmed the north flight path of American Airlines flight 77, but I could not see how that in any way proved their "flyover theory". I did not give the "flyover" theory much thought because it seemed to be a minor point. As it turns out, the strong evidence for the north flight path was just the "hook", and "flyover" was actually their main point.

The most senior NSA official interviewed by the 9/11 Commission with a memo of interview in the recently released batch is undoubtedly Barbara McNamara. She joined the agency in 1963 and held a series of senior management positions, culminating in being deputy director from 1997 to 2000, before being put out to pasture as the NSA’s representative to London.

This is quite the most remarkable passage of the memo:

She does not recall being personally [asked] to provide about transcripts or raw data for [counterterrorism]. NSA has analysts posted across the community. But sharing of raw data is not done routinely by NSA unless they get a specific request for a specific item. She said that she does not remember people asking for raw data, but if they wanted it NSA would have provided it, particularly if they were called by the [CIA Director] or [Deputy CIA Director] or [Assistant CIA Director for Collection].

The National Security Agency drafted a "9/11 Retrospective" following the 2001 attacks, according to a document recently released by the National Archives.

Although an unclassified version of the Justice Department inspector general’s report into the FBI’s performance before 9/11 was published in full in 2006 and the executive summary of a parallel report by the CIA inspector general was released in 2007, this is the first known mention of any NSA review about its failings before the attacks.

The document released by the National Archives is an undated memo of an interview conducted by the 9/11 Commission of an unnamed NSA manager. The manager served as a congressional liaison in the late 1990s and then as a counterintelligence chief from 2000 to 2003. The memo was released last week and was also uploaded to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd by History Commons contributor Erik Larson.

Thanks to www.historycommons.org

(Spring 2000): NSA Does Not Inform FBI Hijacker Almihdhar Is in US, Reason Unclear

Posted in full for posterity; please visit the original and support Sibel Edmonds, 123realchange.blogspot.com and NSWBC.org:

http://123realchange.blogspot.com/2009/06/current-battle-against-state-secrets.html

Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Current Battle against State Secrets Privilege: ‘Sanitization’ is not the answer By Sibel Edmonds

During the past few months I have been actively following the latest activity on the state secrets privilege (SSP). First, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this issue of extreme importance to our civil liberties and constitutional rights was finally getting long-over-due and deserved attention from the media. After all, the memories of fighting SSP in the federal courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, holding press conferences together with the ACLU to bring needed media attention to this draconian abuse, making the rounds in Congress to have them address this ‘privilege’ through legislation to restrict its misuse and abuse, are still fresh and vivid for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?_r=1&hp
N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: April 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

(When Mark Gaffney first published his article on "The 9/11 Mystery Plane" at the Journal of 9/11 Studies (PDF), representatives from CNN contacted him and asked Gaffney to "pull it", supposedly due to his use of some CNN screen captures. The article did eventually go back up, and a couple of months later, Anderson Cooper covered the E-4B's appearance on his CNN show. Can you say, "Damage Control"? Cooper covered the 9/11 blogospheric links mentioning Gaffney's article, [including some free advertising for 911blogger], while somehow studiously avoiding any mention of Gaffney's article or the Journal. Ultimately, this only inspired Gaffney to write one of the best books on 9/11 to be published in the last six months, "The 9/11 Mystery Plane: And the Vanishing of America". If you can afford to in this troubled economy, please purchase a copy to show some support for Mr. Gaffney and his publisher, TrineDay. In the piece below, Gaffney provides his observations on Bamford's latest NSA book, which like Kevin Fenton's, are very critical of Bamford's support of the official 9/11 story. -rep.)

Eavesdropping on the World
James Bamford’s new book comes up short on 9/11

by Mark H. Gaffney - March 11, 2009

In January 2009, during Israel’s ferocious attacks on Gaza, there were numerous reports on the Internet that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert had boasted about “wagging the US dog.” Supposedly Olmert bragged that he had pulled Bush off a stage while the president was making a speech and demanded that Bush block a UN Security Council cease-fire resolution. The US had already vetoed an earlier cease-fire resolution in late December, but by the eighth of January, with the death toll rapidly mounting in Gaza, Israel’s war against Hamas was wearing thin. For days US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had been working with Arab and European governments to craft a cease-fire resolution that every member of the Security Council would support, including the US.

I just watched PBS Nova’s Spy Factory with James Bamford and I have a number of comments about it, both good and bad.

Starting off with the good, having been writing about al-Qaeda’s communications hub in Yemen for the last two years, I was thrilled to actually see it on the screen. Bamford actually went to Yemen and filmed it from the outside, shame he didn’t go in.

(snip)

The first and most glaring omission is Alec Station deputy chief Tom Wilshire, who was not mentioned at all in the programme. It went into some detail about the blocking of the cable written by Doug Miller, an FBI detailee to Alec Station, to FBI headquarters about Almihdhar’s US visa, but this was attributed merely to the CIA officer we refer to as “Michelle.” Wilshire was her boss, she blocked the cable on his orders, and Bamford knows this well—he wrote it in the book this programme was based on.

(You can watch the documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/program.html )

In case anyone didn't already know, PBS broadcast a very slick and almost unbelievable hour long attempt to reinforce the "incompetence theory" of 9/11.

Comments are now open and registration is pretty straightforward.

Kyle Hence has made a good start, let's give him plenty of support!

Go to:

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewforum.pbs?f=257

I think we should also demand an hour to correct the record, email the ombudsman at PBS, Michael Getler, at:

http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback.html

or call him at:

703-739-5290

Be civil, have your facts in order and keep it short and to the point.

Let's let PBS know that we are watching, brothers and sisters, and that we don't buy the BIG LIE.

Cheers!

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

(James Bamford has done another great deed for the public by revealing the extent of the NSA's wiretapping on U.S. soil, and how the NSA sub-contracts the vast majority of its work to Israeli high-tech firms bristling with "former" Israeli military intelligence agents, and in the case of Verint, a company with serious corruption issues. It was Bamford who popularized the existence of Operation Northwoods in his 2001 book, Body of Secrets. In The Shadow Factory, he sheds light in the secret rooms of Verizon and AT&T, and shows the NSA to be a very poor custodian of the nation's security.)

Bamford Brings the Goods

On October 14, 2008, James Bamford talked about some of the shocking research in his new book on Democracy Now!, with Amy Goodman;

(Continued below the fold...)

Although I am quite happy Amy Goodman is covering this stuff and that Bamford has at least put this on the table, there is definitely an odd way that Bamford has of using the word irony. He actually uses it correctly (semantically that is) when talking about the alleged hijackers living across the highway from Hayden's NSA office. That exchange is here:

AMY GOODMAN: You say that they set up their final base of operations almost next door to the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland?

James Bamford: “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America”

democracynow.org

Video
Click Here (RealPlayer)

10/14/2008

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, can you talk about how the NSA picked up the very first clues about the 9/11 attacks well before the 9/11 attacks?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the very first clue to the 9/11 attack occurred in late December 1999, when the NSA picked up a message from a house in Yemen. The house was being used by bin Laden as his operations center. He didn’t have much capability to operate out of Afghanistan, so all the phone calls, all the messages, email and all that would go to this house in the city of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for a number of years, and in late December 1999, it picked up a particular intercept, picked up a particular phone conversation.

On September 16, 2008, CIA Director and former Director of the NSA Michael V. Hayden came to speak to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. WeAreChangeLA decided to go and join the conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D1wThnJo3Y
Stewart Howe, taking the civil approach while referencing a speech Hayden gave to the CFR last year, asked the Director whether, in the post-9/11 United States of America, we were, in fact, witnessing the controlled demolition of the Constitution and Bill of Rights under the guise of a War on Terror.

Salon recently published an article entitled Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power about a database known as Main Core. The article was focused on domestic surveillance in the US and connected up with a lot of other threads I have noticed swirling around 9/11. It strikes me that this could be the key to uncovering how the intelligence agencies, in particular the NSA, failed in the run up to 9/11 (and a lot more besides), and I will try and explain here how and why I think Main Core could be linked to the attacks.

Given that the article also said that lawmakers are considering the launch of an investigation modelled on the Church Committee into the programme, as well as other aspects of surveillance, this represents a very decent chance of getting to the bottom of what actually happened.

Continued at the History Commons Groups blog.