Friday, October 18, 2013

No NSA Poster Child: The Real Story of 9/11 Hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar


It’s pretty cynical for the intelligence community to use its repeated failures to properly assess information it collected prior to 9/11 as justification for wholesale spying on Americans. 

...the problem was not that the government lacked the right tools to do its job (it had ample authority to trace Mihdhar’s calls). The problem was that the government apparently failed to use them.

 ...repeated efforts to mislead Congress and the American people only make the case more strongly that the government’s surveillance authorities need to be sharply curbed with strong legislation that ends the bulk collection programs, protects Americans’ private communications and adds more transparency and public accountability to these activities. Americans have the right to truthful information about their government’s intelligence activities, and the current oversight system, which depends on whistleblowers willing to risk jail, certainly isn’t working.

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