The Burial of the 9/11 Story that Got Away

Time to shop for a tinfoil hat?--Dictynna

The Bombshell That No One is Pursuing Except Rory O'Connor: "senior White House official leaked top-secret NSA intelligence in 2001 to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller...that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on the United States." This was before 9/11. If Judith Miller knew from a White House source in advance, it begs the earth-shattering question: Why did the Bush administration do nothing to prevent it? And the New York Times let the story drop, to boot.--BUZZFLASH

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted May 25, 2006.

The Times' then managing editor, Bill Keller, was never told about a potential story predicting 9/11 attacks.

Last week, William Scott Malone and I broke the story of how a still anonymous, senior White House official leaked top-secret NSA intelligence in 2001 to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. The intelligence indicated that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on the United States. But the "The 9/11 Story That Got Away" never made it into the paper.

It never made it to the attention of top Times executive Bill Keller either. Keller, now executive editor of the paper, was managing editor in July 2001. But he was kept in the dark when Miller's "impeccable" source first revealed details of highly classified signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an impending Al Qaeda attack, perhaps to be visited on the continental United States. The NSA had been listening in on a conversation between two members of Osama bin Laden's terror network. One was overheard saying to the other, "Don't worry, we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond."