I recently watched a Nova television program about the NSA called “The Spy Factory”. The NSA is an ultra-secret spy organization that is three times larger than the CIA and which is charged with international surveillance using advanced technology.
It was originally prohibited from spying on United States citizens without cause and required prior authorization for spying on US citizen under FISA rules. Its history began with the need to know what Soviet leaders were doing to and there was a ring of listening stations around the Soviet Union. It has a variety of ways of doing this surveillance, many of which are classified. Those inside the NSA say that the letters “NSA” stand for “Never Say Anything”.
The main direction of the program was to show how members of Al Qaida were tracked through their telephones and through satellite communications before the 9-11 attack. However, the NSA would not share this information with either the FBI or the CIA.
While the NSA knew that two known terrorists were in the United States approximately a year and a half before the event occurred it did not inform the FBI, who is responsible for domestic terrorism. Michael Hayden, director of the NSA at that time, told congress that even if Osama bin Laden were to walk across the Canadian/US border it would be unable to tell the FBI because he is then an American person and the NSA must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure. In the meantime the NSA knew from commnications that these individuals were going to flight training school.
One doesn”t have to be a rocket scientist to know that these actions by the NSA smell fishy. Many people in the United States, including the publisher of the Record Bee, focus on extremely unlikely conspiracy theories, in which bombs are planted in buildings on or around the WTC that will simulate an aircraft collision.
Many individuals, including two letters rebutting the publisher”s article are filled with “sturm and drang” and self-righteousness about the silliness of these ideas. However, it would be equally silly to ignore the possibility that a much simpler conspiracy took place right under our noses.
It is known that the organization known as The Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative group, advocated explicitly projecting United States influence throughout the world using sheer power. They even said in one of their papers that it might take a terrorist event to galvanize public opinion in the United Stated to create enough fear in the citizens of our country to allow them to do it.
This does not mean that there was coordinated action between the Bush administration and Al Qaida individuals but it suggests they would both benefit from a terrorist attack on the United States.
And it would be naive to believe that a former president who was capable of suspending habeus corpus, inflicting a policy of torture, and spying on our country”s own citizens, would be incapable of wanting to take advantage of Bin Laden”s goals. He just made sure that the information that would have stopped the 9/11 attack was thwarted. I used to believe that good and evil were too simple concepts. I now believe after having witnessed the previous administrations callous manipulation of the public”s fears that this isn”t completely true.
Eric Habegger
Lakeport
