The NSA’s 9/11 Cover-Up

General Hayden Told a Lie, and It’s a Whopper

All tricksters, other than magicians, depend to a great
extent upon the fact that they are not known to be, or even suspected of
being, tricksters. Therein lies their great advantage.

— John Mulholland (H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, William Morrow Paperbacks, 2010)

Magicians wield secrecy on the theater stage in the service of
illusions. Spies likewise wield illusion on the world stage in the
service of secrecy. So it is with the events behind the attacks of 9/11
where those who question the official story are derided as conspiracy
theorists. Thanks to the investigative digging of reporter James
Bamford, with the assistance of NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and
Kirk Wiebe, the 9/11 crowd can now point to a conspiracy fact: an
incredible cover-up that goes all the way to the top of the American
intelligence community.

In a recent piece published by Foreign Policy
Bamford examines a phone call to a clandestine operations center run by
Osama bin Laden in Yemen during March of 2000. The phone call was
dialed by one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar,
from his apartment in San Diego. In fact, there were a number of such
phone calls made by 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego. Why didn’t our
security services immediately launch investigations?

According to then Director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, the NSA was
unable to determine the geographic origin of these calls despite the
fact that the phone line in Yemen (967-1-200-578) was under intense
scrutiny by NSA. The Yemen number was tracked using a form of
surveillance known as “cast-iron” coverage where dedicated resources were allocated to continuously monitor the line 24/7.