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Edward Snowden: “We did not understand” intel that could have prevented 9/11

May 31, 2014 2:14 pm By Robert Spencer

edward-snowden1Snowden’s friend and ally Glenn Greenwald is a useful idiot for the jihad, a supporter of Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacist groups. That casts their whole enterprise into suspicion as to their motives and intent. At the same time, however, I am not a supporter of these massive surveillance tactics, which in large part appear to arise from a politically correct refusal to face the reality of the jihad threat: intelligence agencies won’t do proper surveillance of mosques and Muslim organizations (when they do they come under heavy fire from Leftist and Islamic supremacist groups, as in the case of the recently-ended NYPD surveillance program), and so just as the TSA treats 80-year-old wheelchair-bound Methodist grandmothers in exactly the same way as they treat 25-year-old Saudi males, so the intel agencies keep everyone under surveillance rather than focusing on groups from which terrorists are much more likely to arise.

In any case, I agree with Snowden on this, although probably not for the reasons he had in mind. He says: “We had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot….The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we have. The problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more hay on a haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the haystack of the human lives of every American citizen in our country.”

And also: “If we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world didn’t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country? Or are we — are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way of life?”

Indeed. I submit that what our intel agencies don’t understand and refuse to understand is Islam and jihad, which they are bound as a matter of policy not to study, not to investigate, not to examine, not to understand. I am sure that this is the point on which Snowden and I part company (among many others, no doubt). The understanding that is lacking, and sorely needed, in our intel agencies, is knowledge of the motives and goals of the jihadists.

“Edward Snowden Questions Failure to Prevent 9/11 Terrorist Attacks,” by Jerin Mathew, International Business Times, May 31, 2014:

The former NSA contractor’s first-ever American television interview was aired by NBC.NBC

Unaired excerpts of the interview by NBC of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden contain the whistleblower’s statements about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The four-hour interview of Snowden by journalist Brian Williams was condensed into a 60-minute programme by NBC. The network showed portions of the interview that were not included in the prime-time broadcast.

In one of the portions, Snowden questioned the US intelligence agencies’ inability to stop the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, despite having massive amount of surveillance.

He noted that the country had all necessary intelligence resources prior to the attack, but it failed to stop the attacks.
“The problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more hay on a haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the haystack of the human lives of every American citizen in our country.”
– Edward Snowden

Read his comments about the terrorist attack below.

“You know, and this is a key question that the 9/11 Commission considered. And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot.”

“We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we have.”

“The problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more hay on a haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the haystack of the human lives of every American citizen in our country.”

“If these programs aren’t keeping us safe, and they’re making us miss connections — vital connections — on information we already have, if we’re taking resources away from traditional methods of investigation, from law enforcement operations that we know work, if we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world didn’t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country? Or are we — are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way of life?

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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    May 31, 2014 at 2:18 pm

    Right. The best person to interpret the jihad data is Robert Spencer.

    CIA, please hire Robert Spencer to train your agents.

    • R. Criagen says

      May 31, 2014 at 3:48 pm

      … and Tim Furnish.

      And Stephen Coughlin.

      And Dan Pipes.

      And many others who have done so in the past but whose influence has been purged by this admin, and the Bush admin before it, for political reasons. We could list them all day. It is not that the U.S. hasn’t the expertise. It is that it refuses to use it, because they think narrative and multicultural bona fides are more weightier matter than the lives and security of their citizens.

      • Aardvark says

        Jun 1, 2014 at 4:29 am

        Those people would be good, but the best way to interpret this data is not to use human beings at all!

        Set up a neural network, train it by feeding in all known information about convicted terrorists, and then feed in all of the data collected from mass surveillance systems, on a daily or weekly schedule, and see what it chucks out.

        There are several advantages to this.
        – A neural network is completely unbiased.
        – If a network throws out the name of a person to be investigated, it is not possible to trace back how this decision was reached. Hence no rubbish about picking on mohammedans, even if all the names it throws out happen to belong to that cult.
        – Neural networks work! And they work very well on this sort of data – so well that most credit card companies use them, very successfully, to detect fraud.

        The Computer is All-Knowing, All-Wise!

  2. Alice says

    Jun 1, 2014 at 1:10 am

    It might help if their interpreters were not inclined to help Allah along.

  3. Green Infidel says

    Jun 1, 2014 at 6:30 pm

    Here’s what Snowden had to say about multi-kulti London. As reported by a newspaper that’s also his biggest fan, the Guardian:

    “On another occasion he flew to City airport in London. He said he was unimpressed by east London’s multiracial neighbourhoods, telling one British user of the forum: “It’s where all of your Muslims live. I didn’t want to get out of the car.”

    Tread carefully, folks… he might actually be on our side!!

  4. Elisheva14 says

    Jun 1, 2014 at 7:42 pm

    Something is very wrong with today’s Intelligence Program. For a starter why trust people like Snowden to do our security. In the past contractor’s were not used to get at Top Secret Information. We need people who are loyal to the US doing these important jobs, not traitors. TSA has many Muslim employees. Why are they trusted to do the screening?

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