Reply #38: To be honest with you, the inside knowledge necessary for the 9/11 attacks

[leveymg]

was limited to what could be learned by a handful of Saudi and Pakistani intelligence operatives and air attaches.

The Vigilant Guardian and other exercises held that day were NOT tightly compartmentalized secrets, and they were all planned months in advance and widely known about by multiple federal agencies and within the Air Force. That means the same information was easily available to foreign intelligence agencies.

The 9/11 attacks no doubt piggy-backed onto them, and an organization such as Ptech may have been useful for monitoring events that day, but they were not an essential feature of the attack. This was one of the areas that DIA and FBI looked very closely at after the attacks, and these investigative leads apparently didn't turn up as much as Singh's article might lead one to believe. Ptec may have been kept open as a conduit for passing disinformation. Several FBI agents were strongly persuaded to back off when they began to investigate al-Kadi and Ptec.

BTW: every major foreign country uses a combination of diplomatic and corporate cover to spy inside the U.S., and US intelligence has been known to keep operations going in order to see what they're doing and who's behind them. Efforts to place trojans and backdoors into USG operating software and communications networks have been ongoing. The vulnerability of NSA, in particular, was greatly increased after much of that agency's IT operations were turned over to private sector contractors. In 2000-01, Gen. Hayden oversaw Operation Groundbreaker that contracted these functions to big telecom and info tech companies. Many of these companies are at least partially foreign-owned, and some are tied to the Abramoff GOP foreign influence-peddling operation. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/25/132559/979