Posted on Jun\u00a022,\u00a02013<\/h4>\n\n<\/p>\nBy Justin Elliott, ProPublica<\/b><\/p>\n
This piece first appeared on ProPublica<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\nIn defending the NSA\u2019s sweeping collection of Americans\u2019 phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly<\/a> pointed out<\/a> how it could have helped thwart the 9\/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego.<\/p>\nLast weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney invoked<\/a> the same argument. <\/p>\nIt is impossible to know for certain whether screening phone records would have stopped the attacks\u2013the program didn\u2019t exist at the time. It\u2019s also not clear whether the program would have given the NSA abilities it didn\u2019t already possess with respect to the case. Details of the current program and as well as NSA\u2019s role in intelligence gathering around the 9\/11 plots remain secret.\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n
But one thing we do know: Those making the argument have ignored a key aspect of historical record. <\/p>\n
U.S. intelligence agencies knew the identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid al Mihdhar, long before 9\/11 and had the ability find him, but they failed to do so.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar,\u201d says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated<\/a> 9\/11 as chairman of the Senate\u2019s intelligence committee. <\/p>\nThese missed opportunities are described in detail in the joint congressional report<\/a> produced by Graham and his colleagues as well as in the 9\/11 Commission report<\/a>. <\/p>\nMihdhar is at the center of the well-known story of the failure of information sharing between the CIA and FBI and other agencies. <\/p>\n
Indeed, the Obama administration\u2019s invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument made by<\/a> the Bush administration eight years ago when it defended the NSA\u2019s warrantless wiretapping program.<\/p>\nMihdhar and the other hijacker with whom he lived in California, Nawaf al Hazmi, were \u201cexperienced mujahideen<\/a>\u201d who had traveled to fight in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and spent time in Afghanistan.<\/p>\nMihdhar was on the intelligence community\u2019s radar at least as early as 1999. That\u2019s when the NSA had picked up communications from a \u201cterrorist facility\u201d in the Mideast suggesting that members of an \u201coperational cadre\u201d were planning to travel to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, according to the commission report<\/a>. The NSA picked up the first names of the members, including a \u201cKhalid.\u201d The CIA identified him as Khalid al Mihdhar.<\/p>\nThe U.S. got photos of those attending the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, including of Mihdhar, and the CIA also learned that his passport had a visa for travel to the U.S. But that fact was not shared with FBI headquarters until much later, in August 2001, which proved too late.<\/p>\n
\u201cCritical parts of the information concerning al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi lay dormant<\/p>\n
within the Intelligence Community for as long as eighteen months,\u201d the congressional 9\/11 report concludes<\/a>, \u201cat the very time when plans for the September 11 attacks were proceeding. <\/p>\nThe CIA missed repeated opportunities to act based on information in its possession that these two Bin Ladin associated terrorists were traveling to the United States, and to add their names to watchlists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using their true names, Mihdhar and Hazmi for a time beginning in May 2000 even lived<\/a> with<\/a> an active FBI informant in San Diego.<\/p>\nThe U.S. lost track of Mihdhar\u2019s trail in Asia in early 2000, but there were more chances. <\/p>\n
\u201cOn four occasions in 2001, the CIA, the FBI, or both had apparent opportunities to refocus on the significance of Hazmi and Mihdhar and reinvigorate the search for them,\u201d the 9\/11 Commission report says<\/a>. The report concludes that if more resources had been applied and a different approach taken, Mihdhar could have been found and stopped. <\/p>\nSo, apart from all the missed opportunities, would a theoretical metadata program capturing phone records of all Americans made a difference before 9\/11?<\/p>\n
Key details about Mihdhar\u2019s activities and the NSA before 9\/11 remain classified so it\u2019s difficult answer conclusively. <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s turn to the comments<\/a> of FBI Director Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee last week.<\/p>\nMueller noted that intelligence agencies lost track of Mihdhar following the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting but at the same time had identified an \u201cAl Qaida safe house in Yemen.\u201d <\/p>\n
He continued: \u201cThey understood that that Al Qaida safe house had a telephone number but they could not know who was calling into that particular safe house. We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safe house was al Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this [metadata] program in place at the time we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego.\u201d<\/p>\n
In turn, the number would have led to Mihdhar and potentially disrupted the plot, Mueller argued. <\/p>\n
(Media accounts<\/a> indicate that the \u201csafe house\u201d was actually the home of Mihdhar\u2019s father-in-law, himself a longtime al Qaida figure, and that the NSA had been intercepting calls to the home for several years.)<\/p>\nThe congressional 9\/11 report sheds some further light<\/a> on this episode, though in highly redacted form. <\/p>\nThe NSA had in early 2000 analyzed communications between a person named \u201cKhaled\u201d and \u201ca suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East,\u201d according to this account. But, crucially, the intelligence community \u201cdid not determine the location from which they had been made.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, the report suggests, the NSA actually picked up the content of the communications between Mihdhar and the \u201cYemen safe house\u201d but was not able to figure out who was calling or even the phone number he was calling from.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Y]ou should not assume that the NSA was then able to determine, from the contents of communications, the originating phone number or IP address of an incoming communication to that place in Yemen,\u201d said Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9\/11 Commission, in an email to ProPublica. \u201cIt would depend on the technical details of how the signals were being monitored.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until after 9\/11 that the FBI figured out that \u201cKhaled\u201d was hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar, calling from San Diego.<\/p>\n
The 9\/11 Commission report itself does not appear to describe the communication between Mihdhar and Yemen. <\/p>\n
When the Commission report was released in 2004, according to Zelikow, \u201cwe could not, because the information was so highly classified publicly detail the nature of or limits on NSA monitoring of telephone or email communications.\u201d Information on the topic remains classified, he added. <\/p>\n
Zelikow called Mueller\u2019s recent assertion about the metadata program \u201caccurate and fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is definitely possible that, with the kind of databases that Mueller is discussing, used properly, the US government would have been alerted during 2000 to the presence in the U.S.\u2013and possibly the location\u2013of these individuals\u2013and possibly others he did not mention who arrived later,\u201d Zelikow said.<\/p>\n
Theories about the metadata program aside, it\u2019s not clear why the NSA couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t track the originating number of calls to Yemen it was already listening to. <\/p>\n
Intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who wrote the 2009 NSA history Secret Sentry<\/a>, says that the agency would have had both the technical ability and legal authority to determine the San Diego number that Mihdhar was calling from. <\/p>\n\u201cBack in 2001 NSA was routinely tracking the identity of both sides of a telephone call,\u201d he told ProPublica.<\/p>\n
The NSA did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI stood by Mueller\u2019s argument but declined to further explain how the metadata program would have come into play before 9\/11. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s another wrinkle in the Mihdhar case: In the years after 9\/11, media<\/a> reports<\/a> also suggested that there were multiple calls that went in the other direction: from the house in Yemen to Mihdhar in San Diego. But the NSA apparently also failed to track where those calls were going. <\/p>\nIn 2005, the Los Angeles Times quoted<\/a> unnamed officials saying the NSA had well-established legal authority before 9\/11 to track calls made from the Yemen number to the U.S. In that more targeted scenario, a metadata program vacumming the phone records of all Americans would appear to be unnecessary.<\/p>\nThat story followed President Bush\u2019s defense of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, which had just been revealed<\/a> by the New York Times. <\/p>\n
By Justin Elliott, ProPublica<\/b><\/p>\n
This piece first appeared on ProPublica<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n In defending the NSA\u2019s sweeping collection of Americans\u2019 phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly<\/a> pointed out<\/a> how it could have helped thwart the 9\/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego.<\/p>\n Last weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney invoked<\/a> the same argument. <\/p>\n It is impossible to know for certain whether screening phone records would have stopped the attacks\u2013the program didn\u2019t exist at the time. It\u2019s also not clear whether the program would have given the NSA abilities it didn\u2019t already possess with respect to the case. Details of the current program and as well as NSA\u2019s role in intelligence gathering around the 9\/11 plots remain secret.\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n But one thing we do know: Those making the argument have ignored a key aspect of historical record. <\/p>\n U.S. intelligence agencies knew the identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid al Mihdhar, long before 9\/11 and had the ability find him, but they failed to do so.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar,\u201d says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated<\/a> 9\/11 as chairman of the Senate\u2019s intelligence committee. <\/p>\n These missed opportunities are described in detail in the joint congressional report<\/a> produced by Graham and his colleagues as well as in the 9\/11 Commission report<\/a>. <\/p>\n Mihdhar is at the center of the well-known story of the failure of information sharing between the CIA and FBI and other agencies. <\/p>\n Indeed, the Obama administration\u2019s invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument made by<\/a> the Bush administration eight years ago when it defended the NSA\u2019s warrantless wiretapping program.<\/p>\n Mihdhar and the other hijacker with whom he lived in California, Nawaf al Hazmi, were \u201cexperienced mujahideen<\/a>\u201d who had traveled to fight in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and spent time in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Mihdhar was on the intelligence community\u2019s radar at least as early as 1999. That\u2019s when the NSA had picked up communications from a \u201cterrorist facility\u201d in the Mideast suggesting that members of an \u201coperational cadre\u201d were planning to travel to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, according to the commission report<\/a>. The NSA picked up the first names of the members, including a \u201cKhalid.\u201d The CIA identified him as Khalid al Mihdhar.<\/p>\n The U.S. got photos of those attending the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, including of Mihdhar, and the CIA also learned that his passport had a visa for travel to the U.S. But that fact was not shared with FBI headquarters until much later, in August 2001, which proved too late.<\/p>\n \u201cCritical parts of the information concerning al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi lay dormant<\/p>\n within the Intelligence Community for as long as eighteen months,\u201d the congressional 9\/11 report concludes<\/a>, \u201cat the very time when plans for the September 11 attacks were proceeding. <\/p>\n The CIA missed repeated opportunities to act based on information in its possession that these two Bin Ladin associated terrorists were traveling to the United States, and to add their names to watchlists.\u201d<\/p>\n Using their true names, Mihdhar and Hazmi for a time beginning in May 2000 even lived<\/a> with<\/a> an active FBI informant in San Diego.<\/p>\n The U.S. lost track of Mihdhar\u2019s trail in Asia in early 2000, but there were more chances. <\/p>\n \u201cOn four occasions in 2001, the CIA, the FBI, or both had apparent opportunities to refocus on the significance of Hazmi and Mihdhar and reinvigorate the search for them,\u201d the 9\/11 Commission report says<\/a>. The report concludes that if more resources had been applied and a different approach taken, Mihdhar could have been found and stopped. <\/p>\n So, apart from all the missed opportunities, would a theoretical metadata program capturing phone records of all Americans made a difference before 9\/11?<\/p>\n Key details about Mihdhar\u2019s activities and the NSA before 9\/11 remain classified so it\u2019s difficult answer conclusively. <\/p>\n Let\u2019s turn to the comments<\/a> of FBI Director Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee last week.<\/p>\n Mueller noted that intelligence agencies lost track of Mihdhar following the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting but at the same time had identified an \u201cAl Qaida safe house in Yemen.\u201d <\/p>\n He continued: \u201cThey understood that that Al Qaida safe house had a telephone number but they could not know who was calling into that particular safe house. We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safe house was al Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this [metadata] program in place at the time we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego.\u201d<\/p>\n In turn, the number would have led to Mihdhar and potentially disrupted the plot, Mueller argued. <\/p>\n (Media accounts<\/a> indicate that the \u201csafe house\u201d was actually the home of Mihdhar\u2019s father-in-law, himself a longtime al Qaida figure, and that the NSA had been intercepting calls to the home for several years.)<\/p>\n The congressional 9\/11 report sheds some further light<\/a> on this episode, though in highly redacted form. <\/p>\n The NSA had in early 2000 analyzed communications between a person named \u201cKhaled\u201d and \u201ca suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East,\u201d according to this account. But, crucially, the intelligence community \u201cdid not determine the location from which they had been made.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, the report suggests, the NSA actually picked up the content of the communications between Mihdhar and the \u201cYemen safe house\u201d but was not able to figure out who was calling or even the phone number he was calling from.<\/p>\n \u201c[Y]ou should not assume that the NSA was then able to determine, from the contents of communications, the originating phone number or IP address of an incoming communication to that place in Yemen,\u201d said Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9\/11 Commission, in an email to ProPublica. \u201cIt would depend on the technical details of how the signals were being monitored.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until after 9\/11 that the FBI figured out that \u201cKhaled\u201d was hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar, calling from San Diego.<\/p>\n The 9\/11 Commission report itself does not appear to describe the communication between Mihdhar and Yemen. <\/p>\n When the Commission report was released in 2004, according to Zelikow, \u201cwe could not, because the information was so highly classified publicly detail the nature of or limits on NSA monitoring of telephone or email communications.\u201d Information on the topic remains classified, he added. <\/p>\n Zelikow called Mueller\u2019s recent assertion about the metadata program \u201caccurate and fair.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is definitely possible that, with the kind of databases that Mueller is discussing, used properly, the US government would have been alerted during 2000 to the presence in the U.S.\u2013and possibly the location\u2013of these individuals\u2013and possibly others he did not mention who arrived later,\u201d Zelikow said.<\/p>\n Theories about the metadata program aside, it\u2019s not clear why the NSA couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t track the originating number of calls to Yemen it was already listening to. <\/p>\n Intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who wrote the 2009 NSA history Secret Sentry<\/a>, says that the agency would have had both the technical ability and legal authority to determine the San Diego number that Mihdhar was calling from. <\/p>\n \u201cBack in 2001 NSA was routinely tracking the identity of both sides of a telephone call,\u201d he told ProPublica.<\/p>\n The NSA did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI stood by Mueller\u2019s argument but declined to further explain how the metadata program would have come into play before 9\/11. <\/p>\n There\u2019s another wrinkle in the Mihdhar case: In the years after 9\/11, media<\/a> reports<\/a> also suggested that there were multiple calls that went in the other direction: from the house in Yemen to Mihdhar in San Diego. But the NSA apparently also failed to track where those calls were going. <\/p>\n In 2005, the Los Angeles Times quoted<\/a> unnamed officials saying the NSA had well-established legal authority before 9\/11 to track calls made from the Yemen number to the U.S. In that more targeted scenario, a metadata program vacumming the phone records of all Americans would appear to be unnecessary.<\/p>\n That story followed President Bush\u2019s defense of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, which had just been revealed<\/a> by the New York Times. <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.truthdig.com\/images\/eartothegrounduploads\/5789852737_f22166bf1f_n.jpg\")
<\/p>\n