Progressive World Review

        Last Saturday, and again today, Glenn Greenwald brought to light a very interesting occurrence.  In a speech given in San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in a plea for granting the president the power to eavesdrop on American’s phone calls without obtaining a warrant, related a story claiming that if they had been able to listen in on a particular call, the tragedy of 9/11 might have been averted.  As quoted in Greenwald’s blog,

Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. “We got three thousand. . . . We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

At the time of the attacks, Mr. Mukasey was the chief judge at the federal courthouse a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. (emphasis original)

And, as Greenwald pointed it out, this was certainly a lie because FISA has never required a warrant for listening in on phone calls of this nature, begging the question, if the story is actually true, why didn’t they listen in on this call?  It can’t be claimed that it was uncertainty over the legality of listening in on the call because Bush, by his own admission, was listening in on calls without warrants for sometime.

These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention.

Even under the “old” FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it’s really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have — and should have — eavesdropped on that call and didn’t need a warrant to do so. So why didn’t they? Mukasey’s new claim that FISA’s warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it’s all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the “Afghan safe house.” It just didn’t. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.

Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call — and there unquestionably was not — why didn’t the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this “safe house”? Independently, why didn’t the administration invoke FISA’s 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true — and that’s a big “if” — his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn’t intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration’s failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA — for multiple reasons — did not prevent eavesdropping on that call. (emphasis original)

        Odds are, this whole incident is a complete fabrication by Mukasey, which would be reprehensible to say the least.  But if the story is true, it gives lie to the notion that Bush’s flaunting of the rule of law has done anything to make us safer.  This has been the primary reason given for allowing the president to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants and giving the telecoms complete immunity for helping him.

        In his post today, Greenwald discusses the fact that this call Mukasey refers to isn’t mentioned at all in the 9/11 Commission’s report, and how his attempts to find out what the commission knew or didn’t know about this call have been all but stonewalled.  Greenwald is asking for all concerned citizens to email Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission’s Vice Chairman, and respectfully ask him to illuminate what was known about this most important phone call,

Hamilton is currently the President and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and director of The Center on Congress at Indiana University. Please email him at the address below, politely set forth the extraordinary claims the Attorney General just made about the 9/11 attacks (with citations to media sources about the speech — including here, here, and here), and urge him to fulfill his obligation as 9/11 Commission Vice Chair by confirming whether Mukasey’s revelations are true and/or were disclosed to the Commission during its investigation: Lee.hamilton@wilsoncenter.org.

        The importance of this “phone call” can’t be overstated.  If such a call actually happened, the public has a right to know why the administration didn’t act upon it and why the 9/11 Commission apparently has no knowledge of it.  And if the call was nothing but a fabrication by the nation’s highest ranking law enforcer, then he needs to be held accountable for telling such a disgusting lie.

–Paul Wilden

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