NSA surveillance of 9/11 hijackers

I am trying to write summaries of some of the chapters in the 9/11 Timeline because the material is involved and not everybody wants to read 25,000 words four times before they understand an issue. One of the other contributors to the Timeline (BlackMax) has lent me his blog so I can do this (and a few other things).

You can find the blog here:
http://www.iraqtimeline.com/blog/

First I did Mamoun Darkazanli, one of the hijackers' associates in Hamburg who we have a sneaking suspicion the CIA was not as unsuccessful at recruiting as they claim.

The next one is a summary of the Yemen Hub chapter in the timeline. Basically, the Yemen Hub was a facility run by one the father-in-law of Khalid Almihdhar, one of the Pentagon hijackers. It was al-Qaeda's main global communications hub and bin Laden himself called in repeatedly at one time. It was also involved in the embassy bombings and the Cole attack.

The NSA was on to it from the mid-late 1990s and even intercepted several calls between the hijackers in the US and the hub. However, for reasons that have never been explained, they never told the FBI Almihdhar was in the US and was calling the Yemen hub (even though some of the calls were from a phone registered to Nawaf Alhazmi and the NSA knew both Alhazmi and Almihdhar were al-Qaeda operatives). I could go on, but if you're interested you can read the summary at the blog, and then maybe the chapter.

My opinion is that this is a really big deal, because it is always cited (by Bush, Cheney, Hayden) as the reason for the current administration's warrantless wiretapping program, to which there is such opposition, but no proper explanation for the NSA's failure to notify the FBI the hijackers were in the US has ever been offered.