The super secret NSA has a range of technological capacity for eavesdropping that most of us could not even imagine -- the ability to pick up phone conversations with satellites, and super computers to sort through the data. That's what makes the warrantless surveillance of American citizens so scary.
But some people who should have been targets of the NSA made things too easy and somehow their nefarious conversations did not lead to effective counter-terrorism actions.
Take Hani Hanjour, one of the 9/11 hijackers.
On the night of September 10, 2001, Hanjour took a room in a hotel next door to the NSA, yet they failed to surveille him and prevent his hijacking the next day. According to the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/2033791.stm<quote>
In fact, one of the most bizarre ironies of all this is that
five of the hijackers lived in a motel right outside the gates of the NSA. Early on the morning of 11 September, when Hani Hanjour and his four accomplices left the Valencia Motel on US route 1 on their way to Washington's Dulles airport, they joined the stream of NSA employees heading to work.
<unquote>
Perhaps Hanjour was still below the NSA's radar screen, even though US intelligence had indeed surveilled Mohammed Atta earlier through the Abel Danger program.
Even so, they might have surveilled neighboring hotels because by some other bizarre coincidence, a Saudi official implicated in spreading radical Islam in the US and funding terrorism just happened also to be at a hotel, next door to the NSA, where hijackers were also staying the night of 9/10. According to the Telegraph of London:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/03/wsaud03.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/10/03/ixportal.html<quote>
A senior Saudi Arabian official, now minister for the holy places, stayed at the same hotel as three September 11 hijackers the night before the suicide attacks.
American investigators are trying to make sense of the disclosure that Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen, who returned to Saudi Arabia shortly after the attacks, stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia.
Three of the attackers stayed at the hotel that night and crashed a plane into the Pentagon the following day.
Mr Hussayen became president of the affairs of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the two most sacred sites in Islam, five months after the attacks.
<snip>
But investigators are pooling what they know about his trip to North America, during which he allegedly visited or contacted several Saudi-sponsored charities now accused of links to terrorist groups. There is no suggestion that he knew of any such links.
US prosecutors say Mr Hussayen was a financial backer of a Michigan-based group, the Islamic Assembly of North America, which is accused of disseminating the teachings of two Saudi clerics who advocate violence against the United States.
His nephew, Sami Omar Hussayen, a computer student, is in federal detention in Idaho on charges of visa fraud, accused of failing to disclose his role as an internet webmaster for IANA.
US court filings say the younger Hussayen administered an internet site for IANA that
expressly advocated suicide attacks and using airliners as weapons. IANA received about £2 million from abroad since 1995, court papers allege, including £60,000 from Saleh al-Hussayen.
<snip>
Mr Lindquist said: "We're investigating the IANA.
We have the money flowing to the IANA through the nephew from the uncle. We have the uncle visiting the United States just prior to September 11, and upon his return to the East Coast he's in the same hotel as the hijackers. According to FBI agents he feigns a seizure. It is something that we cannot ignore."<unquote>
The FBI wanted to interview Mr. Hussayen, but he feigned a seizure, was taken to the hospital where he was told there was nothing wrong with him, and he was allowed to leave the US when air traffic resumed.
The NSA targets foreign intelligence organizations also, but the head of one foreign intelligence organization also made surveillance stupifyingly easy.
Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmad, was then the director general or Pakistan's CIA, it's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). Gen. Ahmad had ordered that $100,000 be wired to Mohammed Atta about a year before 9/11, which Atta then used for flight school tuition, when the "Islamic fundamentalist" was not using his funds on booze, coke, hookers, lingerie models and lap dances.
Gen. Ahmad ordered an operative, known as Ahmad Umar Sheikh (as well as Saeed Sheikh and several other names), a British citizen of Pakistani descent, famed as a kidnapper and economic wiz, to wire the money from the United Arab Emirates. Gen. Ahmad had been the main conduit of funds from the US through Pakistan, to the mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and later the paymaster of al Queda and the Taliban through one of the ISI's directorate called "Army of Islam."
Gen. Ahmad made surveillance of his communications and activities shockingly easy by flying to Washington on September 6, 2001 and meeting directly with his counterparts at the Pentagon, CIA, National Security Council and State Department. Indeed,
on the morning of 9/11 as the planes hit the twin towers, the al Queda paymaster was having breakfast with Sen. Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Rep. Porter Goss, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Goss, recall was representative of a district that was adjacent to the county on the gulf coast of Florida where Mohammed Atta attended flight school and would be appointed head of the CIA when the US reorganized its intelligence agencies.
Gen. Ahmed stayed around conveniently after 9/11 to discuss Pakistan's role in cooperating with the "war on terror" in Afghanistan with the State Department and Pentagon.
The 9/11 Commission claims that the source of funding of the hijackers is not an important and misidentified Sheikh as an Egyptian. But the Wall St. Journal and Times of India were hot on this story in late 2001 and early 2002 because it was the smoking gun that linked Pakistan to the hijackers, which directly contradicts the 9/11 Commission view that the only state sponsor of the attacks was Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, the Wall St. Journal reporter responsible for this reporting was Daniel Pearl. As he tracked the story to Lahore Pakistan, he was kidnapped and beheaded by none other than Saeed Sheikh.
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