There have been rumors since the warrantless taps were overtly made public, that the NSA started action within a month or two after the election of Bush. This would not be shocking from the expectations that we have of Bush. Nor would it be surprising to find out the other warrantless projects had started before 911 as well.

That the NSA asked to AT&T to start this project in seven months prior to 911, fits in well with the rumored time line, but it does not fit well with the claimed June 23 date that is present in the same sentence. Does anyone have any clarification on this?

Of course Gonzales lied to Congress. The question is "how many times did he lie to Congress."

If he didn't intend to lie, he would have been put under oath.

Not that lying under oath to Congress means anything.

JUSTICE Alito can attest to that.

They had no interest in the terrorism briefings before 9/11. None. They had no interest in al Qaeda.

Condi Rice couldn't remember even reading the one saying "Bad men in robes thinking of crashing very large airplanes into important things soon."

So why did they set up the program? Who was the target? What were they planning, and who did they think the opposition was going to be?

And why was it utterly necessary for Cheney to take control of the NSC meetings before 9/11 too?

...crossed here. AT&T was lead in one of the three consortiums that bid on Project Groundbreaker seven months prior to 9/11 (the RFP was released 2 March and the contract awarded on 1 August to another consortium) - seems to me that there's a real potential here that this is either a) something that's not quite as it's being billed by the lawyers, because of what Project Groundbreaker was about, or b) a capability that they already had that they wanted to update and outsource (but decided post 9/11 to keep in-house as the much more sensitive version of the programme spun up).

More to the point, remember that this allegation's all about them building hardware - damned sure that they had the hardware to do this sort of thing involving non-US persons prior to Groundbreaker; near as I can see the big change post-9/11 was policy related (i.e., changes in who they decided to collect on), not hardware related. Just because they wanted to outsource the hardware, it doesn't mean that this necessarily presages the post 9/11 policy changes.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

... that kind of information puts Cheney and Hayden's remarks back into perspective. After all, wanting a program is not having a program and preparing the infrastructure for monitoring is not actually monitoring.