PBS: NSA could have prevented 9/11 hijackings

Muriel Kane writes:

The super-secretive National Security Agency has been quietly monitoring, decrypting, and interpreting foreign communications for decades, starting long before it came under criticism as a result of recent revelations about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Now a forthcoming PBS documentary asks whether the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if it had been more willing to share its data with other agencies. Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, and found that it had been closely monitoring the 9/11 hijackers as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin Laden's operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped bin Laden's satellite phone, starting in 1996. "The NSA never alerted any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington," Bamford told PBS.

Please remember, this was before the PATRIOT Act and all the other recent incursions into our civil rights and privacy. They didn't use the tools they had, but still used 9/11 as the excuse to grab more power. The federal law enforcement agencies have these legislative proposals sitting on the shelf, just waiting for the next crisis. For example, much of the PATRIOT Act was originally proposed by Clinton after the OKC bombing, but was rejected by the Republican Congress. So it went back on the shelf, 9/11 occurs and off the shelf it comes and is approved by both R's & D's. Later, encouraged by their success, Bush proposed PATRIOT II. The bill went nowhere and is back on the shelf...just waiting for the next "crisis."