"the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks"....

[Junkdrawer]

The narrative I keep hearing regarding the FISA "compromise" goes something like this:

> FISA was broken.
> After 9/11 Bush took the initiative and did what he had to to protect the country.
> Congress moved to fix FISA so that the country could be protected.

Interesting story. And for the average American with the memory of a goldfish, I'm sure it all makes sense. Too bad it's probably full of shit.

You see, Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, in his attempt to defend himself from what he claims is a politically motivated prosecution, claims that he was approached more than six months before 9/11 and asked to implement illegal domestic spying:

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper.

...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR2007101202485.html?hpid=topnews

And Nacchio is not alone:

...

And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.

According the allegations in the suit:

The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATTÌs long distance network. <...>

The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush.

An ATT Solutions logbook reviewed by counsel confirms the Pioneer-Groundbreaker project start date of February 1, 2001.

...

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/qwest-ceo-not-a.html

That's what the lawsuits were all about. The Reid/Pelosi/Hoyer Congress refused to actively investigate this so citizens took the phone companies that participated to court. And now the Reid/Pelosi/Hoyer Congress is going to pass a law to retroactively dismiss the lawsuits.

Ya know, it's things like this that give credence to those silly conspiracy theorists that believe that the government had more of a role in 9/11 than we're being told.