A sign is displayed outside the National Security Administration campus in Fort Meade, Md.You may remember Mohammed al Qahtani – not for what he did, but for what he was unable to do. Turned away by an immigration officer from America’s shores in Orlando, the Saudi never made connections he planned to make for flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.
Flight 93 slammed into rural Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the group, now without Qahtani, before presumably being aimed at either the White House or the Capitol building.
We will never know if Qahtani’s absence doomed the terrorists’ Flight 93 plan, but we do know he was later captured in Pakistan where his fingerprints matched those taken by Jose Melendez-Perez during the interrogation in Orlando, according to Glenn Beck’s “Miracles and Massacres.”
Perez did not have metadata, phone records, drones — but he did have decades of service in the U.S. Army, along with two tours in Vietnam, and excellent powers of observation and common sense.
Fast-forward to the current collection of “exabytes” (imagine megabytes on steroids, squared) of information contained in emails, phone calls, text messages, ad nauseam, now amassed by the NSA. The Utah Data Center, for example, was completed last year at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion.