{"id":43552,"date":"2014-06-02T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=43552"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:33:47","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:33:47","slug":"read-snowdens-comments-on-911-that-nbc-didnt-broadcast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/06\/read-snowdens-comments-on-911-that-nbc-didnt-broadcast\/","title":{"rendered":"Read Snowden\u2019s Comments on 9\/11 That NBC Didn\u2019t Broadcast"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>

This NBC News handout video frame grab shows an NBC News Exclusive interview with Brian Williams and Edward Snowden, excerpted from the May 28, 2014 TV primetime special. (AFP Photo \/ NBC NEWS \/ Handout)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u200bOnly around a quarter of the recent NBC News interview with former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden<\/a> made it to broadcast, but unaired excerpts now online show that the network neglected to air critical statements about the 9\/11 terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n

When the four-hour sit-down between journalist Brian Williams and Snowden made it to air on Wednesday [28 May 2014] night, NBC condensed roughly four hours of conversation into a 60-minute time slot. During an analysis of the full interview afterwards, however, the network showed portions of the interview that didn\u2019t make it into the primetime broadcast, including remarks from the former National Security Agency contractor in which he questioned the American intelligence community\u2019s inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n

In response to a question from Williams concerning a \u201cnon-traditional enemy<\/em>,\u201d Al-Qaeda, and how to prevent further attacks from that organization and others, Snowden suggested that United States had the proper intelligence ahead of 9\/11 but failed to act.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, and this is a key question that the 9\/11 Commission considered. And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot,\u201d<\/em> Snowden said. \u201cWe actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren\u2019t collecting information, it wasn\u2019t that we didn\u2019t have enough dots, it wasn\u2019t that we didn\u2019t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we have.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with mass surveillance is that we\u2019re piling more hay on a haystack we already don\u2019t understand, and this is the haystack of the human lives of every American citizen in our country,\u201d<\/em> Snowden continued. \u201cIf these programs aren\u2019t keeping us safe, and they\u2019re making us miss connections \u2014 vital connections \u2014 on information we already have, if we\u2019re taking resources away from traditional methods of investigation, from law enforcement operations that we know work, if we\u2019re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world didn\u2019t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country? Or are we \u2014 are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that\u2019s actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way of life?<\/em><\/p>\n

Indeed, the director of the NSA during Snowden\u2019s stint there, Gen. Keith Alexander, reportedly endorsed a method of intelligence gathering in which the agency would collect quite literally all the digital information it was capable of.<\/p>\n

\u201cRather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, \u2018Let\u2019s collect the whole haystack,\u2019\u201d<\/em> one former senior US intelligence official recently told the Washington Post<\/a>. \u201cCollect it all, tag it, store it. .\u2009.\u2009.And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In recent weeks, a leaked NSA document has affirmed that under the helm of Alexander, the agency was told it should do as much as possible with the information it gathers: “sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all and exploit it all,\u201d<\/em> according to the slide.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey’re making themselves dysfunctional by collecting all of this data,\u201d<\/em> Bill Binney, a former NSA employee-turned-whistleblower himself, told the Daily Caller<\/a> last year. Like Snowden, Binney has also argued that the NSA\u2019s \u201ccollect it all<\/em>\u201d condition with regards to intelligence gathering is deeply flawed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey’ve got so much collection capability but they can’t do everything. They’re probably getting something on the order of 80 percent of what goes up on the network. So they’re going into the telecoms who have recorded all of the material that has gone across the network. And the telecoms keep a record of it for I think about a year. They’re asking the telecoms for all the data so they can fill in the gaps. So between the two sources of what they’ve collected, they get the whole picture<\/em>,\u201d Binney said.<\/p>\n

Although NBC neglected to play Mr. Snowden\u2019s remarks to Williams in which he questioned the efficiency of modern intelligence gathering under the guise of being a counterterrorism tool, it did air on television other remarks from the former contractor concerning the terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort of scandalize our memories to sort of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don\u2019t need to give up and our Constitution says we don\u2019t need to give up<\/em>,\u201d he said in an excerpt broadcast on air.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 rt.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only around a quarter of the recent NBC News interview with former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden made it to broadcast, but unaired excerpts now online show that the network neglected to air critical statements about the 9\/11 terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}