Mukasey’s mysterious call gets murkier

Two weeks ago, Attorney General Michael Mukasey was talking up the Bush administration’s surveillance efforts, and raised a few eyebrows when he got choked up while discussing 9/11 and telecom immunity.

The real controversy, though, stems from the comments Mukasey made right before he got emotional.

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.”

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. “We got three thousand…. We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

It had the makings of a rather startling admission. Why hadn’t we ever heard about this pre-9/11 call before?

For that matter, why hasn’t former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, heard of it, either? Hamilton told Glenn Greenwald, who’s been doing some terrific work on this story, “I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.”

It raises some interesting possibilities.

Glenn lays it out for us:

In light of Hamilton’s amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey’s extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

I’m leaning towards the latter, but that’s just me.

I’d just add one thing. I checked Nexis this morning to see if any of the major dailies had noted this controversy, even in passing. I found two small newspapers that had run letters to the editor on the subject, but I couldn’t find a single article.

Maybe if John Conyers called a hearing to explore this in a little more detail, a reporter might notice?