Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

That's the statement in its entirety, and it's hard to imagine how it could be any clearer. Hamilton's statement is consistent with the statement of 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow, as well as the letter sent to Mukasey by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and two Subcommittee Chairs, none of whom have any idea what Mukasey was talking about.

More at link:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ton/index.html

My comment: This is total BS in my opinion. Hamilton, who has read the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry report (without the redactions), has either been completely lobotomised or should have figured out what Mukasey's garbled comments really meant. However, because Mukasey got the location of the "safe house" wrong, both Hamilton and Zelikow (who made similar comments) can pretend they don't know anything. Every single 9/11 Commissioner and a bunch of the staff know that the NSA intercepted calls between the hijackers in the US and al-Qaeda's main global communications hub in Yemen (which was involved in the 1998 embassy bombings and, allegedly, the attack on the USS Cole), yet this was kept out of the report, except for a couple of cryptic mentions on pages 87-88 and 222. Why did they do that? Did the NSA have the legal authority to trace the calls? Could they not figure out that calls from one of the Cole bombers to the US might be worth tracing? And that it might be a good idea to tell the FBI?

P.S. I submitted an FOIA request for some of this a while back, the NSA wrote back telling me I would have to prise the information from General Hayden's cold dead hand.