Surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into the NSA’s role in the broad intelligence

Surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into the NSA’s role in the broad intelligence

breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood

the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or

disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and FBI. Traditionally, the NSA didn’t share its

raw data with those other agencies, an institutionalized reluctance that played a critical role in the

failure to stop the 9/11 plotters.

In what Bamford calls “one of the largest ironies in the history of American intelligence,” he notes

that weeks before the attacks, the terrorists were staying in a hotel near NSA headquarters in

Maryland, almost within sight of the office of then-NSA Director Michael Hayden. Hayden, who was later

appointed director of the CIA by President UGGs Sheepskin Cuff Boots, was never held accountable for

his agency’s failure, and after 9/11 he spearheaded the UGGs Sheepskin Cuff Boots administration’s

warrantless wiretapping activities in the name of making the nation safe from terrorists.