Thom Hartmann: Welcome back to our second hour. James Bamford is with us, or is back with us. The internationally best selling, New York Times best selling author, expert on national security issues, new book out “The Shadow Factory,” his most recent book, "Body of Secrets" was just mind-boggling. This the new one, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America". James Bamford, welcome to the program.

James Bamford: Thanks, Thom, appreciate it.

Thom Hartmann: You hit this one out of the park, all over again. This is absolutely extraordinary, James. Give us the overview, the snapshot. What’s the big story here? I mean going all the way back to "The Puzzle Palace" in the ‘80’s you’ve been reporting, which was one of my favorite books back in the 1980’s, you’ve been reporting on the NSA, and you know, pulling no punches. What is the exposé, the core of this book right now?

James Bamford: Well, it’s really two things. One is looking at NSA before 9/11 and showing how they were overly cautious and to the, really to the extreme, where you have the NSA actually eavesdropping on two of the key hijackers for almost two years while they were in the U.S. and never telling anybody that they were in the U.S. And it got to the point where the hijackers actually moved their final base of operations to the same town NSA is located in. So for the final months, NSA was on one side of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the terrorists' operation center was on the other side. And yet, and they’re intercepting their communications, they’re going to the same gyms, the Gold’s Gym, the Safeway with the NSA employees, and the NSA trying to be overly cautious, never bothered to even track where they are in the U.S. So that was one of the contributing factors.

Thom Hartmann: Was that, you know, James Bamford, was that overly cautious? Or was that blindingly incompetent?

James Bamford: Well, it’s a combination of both. They could have easily have gotten, first of all, General Hayden, the director, was very afraid of ever being brought before Congress and charged with eavesdropping on America, but here, there would have been no problem for him to get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance "warranty" to eavesdrop on their communications. I mean after all, these people were sent by Bin Laden to the United States, and it’s something that everybody knew. So, its both incompetence and cautious.

Thom Hartmann:Right. Or is it possible that there’s a third option, and I realize this is, you know, start the Twilight Zone music here, but either 53 or 56 times George W. Bush was notified in person, according to Richard Clarke and others, that Osama Bin Laden was planning some sort of a major strike in the United States. The famous, what August 6th as I recall, NIE, there was the President’s daily briefing where the CIA officer flew down to Crawford Texas to personally deliver it to him, and Condoleezza Rice stood there and read him the headline: Osama Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S. And Bush not only did nothing, but, you know, what you’re saying is it was more than nothing being done, it was things were being held back.

James Bamford: It got even worse at one point. The CIA wanted this information from NSA. They knew how important it was because it was coming out of Bin Laden’s operation center in Yemen. And the NSA wouldn’t give it to the CIA, so the CIA ended up building their own eavesdropping facility in the Indian Ocean area, I think on Madagascar. And so they were intercepting the same communications, but they were only getting half of the conversations, and then they went to NSA and said ‘We’ve got our own facility, we’re getting half the conversations, but can you give us the other half?’ and NSA wouldn’t give it to them.

Thom Hartmann: You know, sometimes you look at history and you say what happened? You know, who won? 9/11 rescued a very, very disfunctional Bush Presidency, and you know, the week before 9/11 George Bush’s approval numbers were in the tank, he had virtually no political power. There was, he had the whole PNAC thing, saying that we need, Project for New American Century, we need a new Pearl Harbor kind of event. I realize, I’m getting into the far fringes of conspiracy theory here, and I don’t for a minute, frankly, I don’t think that the Bush administration was behind 9/11 or anything like that, although, who knows? But could it be that they thought that something was coming and essentially they said stand down, we could use something?

James Bamford: Well, uh, you know, the problem is, I think that would be too complicated for the Bush Administration. I don’t think they would have been able to pull something off, as incompetent as they are.

Thom Hartmann: So why did the NSA go into this, you know, their whistling and twiddling their fingers mode, when they’ve got terrorists in their sight? People who, I mean this was the second time that the World Trade Center was bombed.

James Bamford: Exactly, and again, NSA had been eavesdropping on these conversations while these people were in the United States, from January 2000 until September 2001.

Thom Hartmann: So why were they not sharing this information?

James Bamford: The only, and this is why in the book, I say that I can’t come up with all the answers.

Thom Hartmann: I mean they answer directly, Hayden answers directly to George Bush, right?

James Bamford: Well, he answered to Rumsfeld. Because it comes out of the Pentagon and then obviously Rumsfeld answered to Bush. But yeah, that’s why I said there’s got to be a real investigation into all this. The 9/11 Commission did nothing, they didn’t even look at NSA.

Thom Hartmann: Right, ok, so you said that was point one. Point two was?

James Bamford: The second one was how NSA overreacted after 9/11.

Thom Hartmann: Right.

James Bamford: Before 9/11 they shied away from doing any, even eavesdropping on terrorists in the U.S. After 9/11 they began eavesdropping on even Americans in the U.S. who were totally innocent. And I interviewed two of the NSA intercept operators who told me that they were eavesdropping, they were ordered to eavesdrop on U.S. American citizen communications between the U.S. and the Middle East. So you have people, journalists, aid workers, soldiers, and so forth, calling home to their families, and they’re sitting there listening, typing out the conversations, and permanently recording them. And then, it got so bad that they, when, you know, these people were talking to their spouses about, you know, bedroom chat, they’re laughing and passing these conversations around, whenever the conversations turned to sex. So this isn’t exactly, I don’t think, what the tax payers had in mind when they’re paying for NSA to, you know, to have their own conversations listened to, recorded, and made jokes of.

Thom Hartmann: Now, Orrin Hatch, the Republican Senator from Utah, had a fellow on his staff who had succeeded in hacking into Senator Kennedy’s computer. This was about four years ago, during the times when Alito was being brought before Congress to be confirmed, and a number of other judges as well. And over a year and a half period, this guy, on a virtually daily basis, was reading Senator Kennedy, and apparently six or eight other Senators, Democratic Senators, emails. And producing summaries of them and sending them to several Republicans who were charged with strategy on how to get Republican Judges through Congress. And they constantly were catching the Democrats flat footed. You know, they knew their strategy in advance and were able to blow it up very successfully. When this guy got outed, when this whole thing came out, Orrin Hatch fired him and apologized, professed he didn’t know anything about it, and of course Republicans controlled Congress so there was no investigation done of it at all and still hasn’t been, to this day.

If these guys would hack into their peer's computer and read their email, why would Bush not be doing the exact same thing Richard Nixon did. Nixon was using either the CIA or FBI, I forget which, during Watergate to spy on Democrats and on his political enemies. Is there any evidence that the NSA might have been used in this way, or any other intelligence agencies, might have been used in this way for political purposes? I know we did this with the UN, did we not?

Running up the Iraq War? Weren't we hacking?

James Bamford: Yeah, exactly, they were listening to all the, even the British communications and so forth. Yeah. The point you make is very, it’s an excellent point because all this information that’s being picked up is stored forever. They’re building a huge new data warehouse. They ran out of space at NSA and they’re building a huge new data warehouse in Texas that’s almost the size of the Alamo zone, to store all this stuff. So, yeah. Somebody could just go in, type into a computer a particular name, and up comes a conversation. I mean, numerous times. Watergate instance you talked about has been numerous times when conversations are...

Thom Hartmann: So, it’s entirely possible that they’re spying on Democrats right now for political purposes, is there any evidence that it has been done?

James Bamford: I haven’t come up with it, but that’s why think, I’m one person out there writing one book. But I think there needs to be more people looking into it. It certainly is a possibility and whenever you have politicians and everybody else eavesdropping...

Thom Hartmann: No, it's ripe territory. You’re absolutely right. James Bamford, the book "Shadow Factory", check it out. It’s a great book. Thank you James.

James Bamford: Thanks, Thom.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.