Mukasey asked to explain terror call remarks

[maddezmom]

Source: SFGate

Mukasey asked to explain terror call remarks
Two weeks after Attorney General Michael Mukasey tearfully told a San Francisco audience the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the government had been able to wiretap a phone call from Afghanistan, the Justice Department is still trying to explain what he meant, and a congressional leader is demanding answers.

Among the questions posed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., to Mukasey is whether any such phone call actually occurred and, if so, why the government wasn't able to use its legal and technological powers to monitor it.

The attorney general, speaking to the Commonwealth Club on March 27, defended President Bush's program of wiretapping calls between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without court authorization and said no warrant should be needed to eavesdrop on a phone call from Iraq to the United States.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, Mukasey said, "we knew that there had 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."



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/11/MNRH103EK8.DTL&hw=mukasey&sn=001&sc=1000

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More on Michael Mukasey's false 9/11 and FISA claims
The San Francisco Chronicle became one of the few media outlets to report on the multiple false claims about 9/11 and FISA in Michael Mukasey's speech two weeks ago, as they adeptly summarized the key events in this article today. As the article, using the Lee Hamliton and other quotes reported here, put it: "It seemed like a sensational disclosure -- a phone call that, if traced and monitored, could have allowed authorities to thwart the attacks -- but it has proved difficult to verify."

Also, Mukasey appeared yesterday before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee and was questioned on this matter by Pat Leahy:

On his third question, Leahy asked Mukasey to clarify a recent comment he made in San Francisco where he implied that the failure to listen in on a phone call from Afghanistan to the United States prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had cost 3,000 lives.

"Nobody else seems to know about this. Can you tell me what the circumstances were and why?" Leahy said.

"The phone call I referenced relates to an incoming call that is referred to in a letter in February of this year to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Reyes <(D-Texas)> from Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and I," Mukasey said.

more:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/11/mukasey/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/greenwald

[williesgirl]

1. Good - call him on this shit. If it did happen, why couldn't they tap, then get FISA warrant in 3

days? This is bullshit and needs to be shown as such. Embarrass the fucker. rec'd

[Wizard777]

2. Lets see. They wouldn't allow FBI Agents to go to Florida to ask the actual 9/11 terrorists why they

were here taking flying lessons. Even if no one could envision those planes being used as missles. They knew planes were going to be hijacked and didn't care to even try to prevent that. But this phone call.......:eyes: Mukasey needs to face facts. If those terrorists would have chickened out. Bush would have had Rice and Powell fly those planes into the WTC.

[KJF]

3. The other country was Yemen, not Afghanistan

"One thing I got wrong. It didn’t come from Afghanistan. I got the country wrong," Mukasey continued without specifying the country where the call originated.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2008/04/senators-grill.html?cid=110340778#comments

It is mentioned in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright and The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind. I have helped compile a Timeline about this, which you can find here:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&projects_and_programs=complete_911_timeline_yemen_hub

The phone in Yemen was linked to a guy named Ahmed al-Hada, a close associate of bin Laden who was involved in the African embassy and USS Cole attacks in which about 240 people died.

[gratuitous]

4. Well, if you're going to get all stinky about it

No, it didn't technically "happen," but it could have, and if it had, and if something significant had been said (which we don't know), then it could have been, I dunno, bad or something.

I mean, it's not like there was a memo titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in the United States" sitting on someone's desk a month before September 11. Intercepting this phone call would have put us on alert in a way that a memo never could!

Clap harder or Tinker Bell dies, dammit. Why are you asking so many questions?

[Igel]

5. Leahy really should read Enc, M. "The semantics of specificity." LI 22(1991).1: 1-25. n/t

[maddezmom]

6. a good recap from EFF: Mukasey's Missed Call

Mukasey's Missed Call
Posted by Kurt Opsahl
Yesterday, Senator Leahy asked tough questions and this morning the San Francisco Chronicle continued its investigation of the mysterious phone call that Attorney General Mukasey referenced while speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco a few weeks ago. During the questions after his speech, Mukasey said that the government:

shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq 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.

Mukasey then got very emotional, and claimed the attacks of 9/11 were a direct result of this intelligence failure. In other words, the Attorney General is saying that the attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented -- if only our intelligence agencies had not been restricted by what he saw as unfair and unreasonable civil liberties protections. This is a gross distortion of the facts and the law, as the nation's top lawyer well knows.

~snip~

Hayden also noted that, under the rules implementing EO 12333, "no information, to, from, or about a U.S. person may be retained unless the information is necessary to understand a particular piece of foreign intelligence or assess its importance." This would have prevented the NSA from retaining the information acquired if that information had no intelligence value. However, the call described by Mukasey, he asserts, would have prevented 9/11. Certainly, EO 12333 would not have prevented the NSA from retaining such as call.

Accordingly, it does not appear that either FISA or Executive Order 12333 would have prevented the government from conducting surveillance on the call described by Mukasey. Instead, the example shows that the law was sufficient, and any failure lay in the hands of the Executive Branch.

more:http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/mukaseys-missed-call

[Supersedeas]

7. thanks for the link: with lawyers like Mukasy Gonzalez and Yoo, the ABA can be so proud