The Republican Senator tossed General Michael Hayden a big, fat softball of a question: "Do you think that if you had this program ...." of wiretaps without warrants, "... in place before September 11th you might have prevented it?"
General Hayden jumped right on it. He said that yes, if he had his secret powers then, that he has today, he could have stopped al Qaeda's plot.
Then he said, there were two guys in San Diego ...
He was referring to Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar. George Bush also talks about them when he wants to justify wiretaps without warrants. The truth is that Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar are the poster boys for missed opportunities. If the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and the White House had not screwed up so royally, mostly by cherishing their secrets, they would have had al Hasmi and al Mihdhar several times over.
Here are the facts.
Both of them were in the NSA and CIA files. They'd fought in Bosnia. They'd been to Afghanistan. They had friends and relatives who were jihadists and who were in Al Qaeda and they had associations with bin Laden.
In December, 1999 the NSA picked up several names in relation to an upcoming meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the capitol of Malaysia. They got al Mihdhar's full name but only al Hazmi's first name, Nawaf. They could have figured out who he was if they had checked in their own data base. But they didn't.
The CIA tracked al Mihdhar when he traveled from Yemen to the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, arriving on January 5th, 2000. The CIA had the event under surveillance. Al Mihdhar was photographed there. The team noted that some of the terrorists, including al Mihdhar and al Hazmi, flew to Bangkok on January 8th, where they lost track of them. Also in January, the CIA found out that al Mihdhar had a US passport.
The top people in the CIA and the FBI, including it's director, Louis Freeh, were briefed by the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) on the meeting.
In March, the CIA's Bangkok office reported that al Hazmi had left Thailand on January 15th and flown to Los Angeles. He was accompanied by al Mihdhar, though that did not show up on the flight report.
What we are supposed to believe is that unwarranted wiretaps would have made them smarter in connecting the dots. Yah, sure, and if we had 007 on the job he would have stopped 9/11.
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