More lies from the NSA?

NSA claimed that they were not allowed to listen in on a call from San Diego to Osama bin Laden in the run up to 9/11, and therefore needed the PATRIOT Act and the massive domestic surveillance program to prevent this from happening again.  Former NSA insiders are disputing this, saying that this was an internal NSA screw-up on multiple levels:

In an agency filled with secrets, the NSA’s failure to detect the 9/11 plot or help other agencies do so is probably its deepest and darkest. For years, rather than reveal the true nature of the blunder, the agency has instead propagated the fable that it missed that San Diego call in 2000 for technical reasons. Consequently, the Bush and Obama administrations conducted what amounted to ironclad surveillance of Americans’ phone activity for more than a decade.

The dragnet metadata operation, finally declared illegal by a federal appeals court this year, was likely the largest and most secretive domestic surveillance program ever undertaken. Yet the public only became aware thanks to the information leaked by Edward Snowden. Today, other NSA whistleblowers are claiming that the program was based on a lie. They’re also demanding answers to tough questions: How were certain key phone numbers missed in surveillance—or were they at all? And why did the NSA refuse to share with the CIA and FBI the full details of what it collected from bin Laden’s operations center in Yemen?

Fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks, it seems time for the NSA and the White House to reveal what really happened—and to replace, once and for all, fiction and lies with facts and the truth.

This is Jim Bamford, so you might take this with a grain of salt.  However, he has sources on record here; also, General Clapper is still not behind bars for perjury before Congress.