Bush Admin Now Says They Let 9/11 Happen?

AG Mukasey lets this one out:

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went." (snip)

These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention.

Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't.

This apparent admission by Mukasey that they knew of "terrorists" calling the US but weren't allowed to spy on them is rather absurd in simple fact of law, as Glenn Greenwald points out above. But this apparent admission at face value also implies that the administration knew of these calls but did nothing about them. Is this administration now giving a limited hangout that they let the attacks happen?

UPDATE: Some interesting developments here from Greenwald:

The great significance of this story -- that Mukasey either completely fabricated a key 9/11 event or just revealed a heretofore unknown 9/11 bombshell -- is self-evident and made clear by these growing accounts. Having Hamilton, Kean and/or Zelikow comment on the veracity of Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attacks -- as they ought to do -- is vital for advancing the story.