The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

''The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,'' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. ''This undermines that assertion.''

The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.

In a roundtable discussion, a trio of former National Security Agency whistle-blowers tell USA TODAY that Edward Snowden succeeded where they failed.

When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.

Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.

For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.

To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.

Today, they feel vindicated.

U.S. government investigators began an urgent search for Edward Snowden several days before the first media reports were published on the government's secret surveillance programs, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Snowden, who has admitted to providing details of the top-secret programs, had worked on assignment at a Hawaii facility run by the National Security Agency for about four weeks before he said he was ill and requested leave without pay, according to the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

When Snowden failed to return, that prompted a hunt for the contractor, first by his employer Booz Allen Hamilton and then by the U.S. government, they said.

Snowden, 29, was known among colleagues as a very gifted "geek," according to one of the sources, who added, "This guy's really good with his fingers on the keyboard. He's really good."

Exclusive: Laura Poitras tells Salon about getting contacted by Edward Snowden, and reveals more footage is coming

Shortly after Salon's biographical sketch on Laura Poitras went live, the award-winning documentary filmmaker agreed to a phone interview, her first since she helped reveal the scope of the National Security Agency's digital surveillance. "I feel a certain need to be cautious about not wanting to do the work for the government," she told Salon, but agreed to clarify some parts of her role in the story.

Poitras is still in Hong Kong, where she is filming the story behind the story - including her co-author on the Guardian story and former Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald - for her forthcoming documentary on whistle-blowers and leaks. In a wide-ranging interview, she explained how she first made contact with Snowden, her reaction to the possible future investigation into his leaks, and why Snowden didn't go to the New York Times. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

So how did this all begin?

I was originally contacted in January, anonymously.

By Edward Snowden?

Well, I didn't know who it was.

What was the format?

Via email. It said, I want to get your encryption key and let's get on a secure channel.

And he didn't say what it was about?

He just said - that was the first, and the second was, I have some information in the intelligence community, and it won't be a waste of your time.

Do you get a lot of those kinds of requests?

No, I don't.

In "Stocks for the Long Run," economist Jeremy Siegel researched all the "big market moves" between 1801 and 2001. Bottom line: 75% of the time, there is no rationale for "big moves." No one can predict them. Maybe technicians and traders can pick short-term moves the next second. Maybe tomorrow. But the long-term "big market moves?" No way. Now why predict an "87%" chance of another meltdown in 2013? Because in the real world of statistical probabilities, historical facts and expert opinions danger signals are flashing wild.

In mid-2008 we summarized the predictions of 20 experts over several years. Predicted a meltdown in a few years - markets crashed two months later. Fast. In retrospect, it was inevitable, thanks in part to the hype, arrogance and incompetence of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who failed to prepare America. The warnings are again accelerating. And so is the happy talk from Wall Street casino insiders, about rallies, housing recoveries, perpetual cheap money. Don't listen. The next crash will happen by year-end. Yes, there's a 13% chance the next Fed chairman will keep printing cheap money into 2014. But on New Years Eve our aging bull will be 4½ years old, well past Bill O'Neill's "average" 3.75 years for putting this bull out to pasture. So unless you're shorting, all bets on Wall Street casinos for 2014 are megarisk, like 2008. Like a Stephen King horror film, you feel it coming. Could happen anytime, even tomorrow, says Siegel's research, or the unpredictable logic in Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan." -

President Obama's trip this month to Africa, with the first family tagging along, is projected to cost taxpayers as much as $100 million, sparking criticism as the federal government scrimps along during sequester-related budget cuts.

Among the related costs will be fighter jets; hundreds of Secret Service agents; a Navy ship with a full trauma center; and military cargo planes to bring 56 vehicles including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. The details were reported by The Washington Post, based on a confidential planning document.

The trip to sub-Sahara Africa runs from June 26 to July 3.

The president and first lady have cancelled plans to go on a safari that would have included the additional expense of a sharp-shooting team, responsible for putting down a cheetah, lion or any other wild animal that became a threat.

Figuring out the exact cost of the overall trip is difficult because the information is classified for the purpose of national security.

However, a Government Accountability Office report shows President Clinton's 1998 trip to six African nations cost at least $42.7 million - not including Secret Service expenses.

Obama's trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, a person familiar with the Obama journey but not authorized to speak for attribution told The Post.

The trip comes as agencies across the federal government try to find cost-saving measures to deal with the massive, across-the-board budget cuts known as sequester, which kicked in this year after Washington lawmakers failed to agree on a more measured approach. The Secret Service, for example, pushed to cancel public White House tours to save thousands in weekly overtime expenses.

"For the cost of this trip to Africa, you could have 1,350 weeks of White House tours," Rep. George Holding, a North Carolina Republican, said last week. "It is no secret that we need to rein in government spending, and the Obama administration has regularly and repeatedly shown a lack of judgment for when and where to make cuts. ... The American people have had enough of the frivolous and careless spending."

The White House had defended the trip cost saying the Secret Service plan determines the security cost and that first family's trip will result in long-term goodwill.

"The infrastructure that accompanies the president's travels is beyond our control," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. "When you travel to regions like Africa that don't get a lot of presidential attention, you tend to have very long-standing and long-running impact from the visit."

Stand-up comedian, columnist and actor Russell Brand on the BBC's Question Time debate, June 2013.

Seventeen years after the Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island, producers Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson have released a new documentary - simply titled "TWA Flight 800" - that has the very real potential to re-open the investigation into the plane's destruction.

Kudos, in particular, to Stalcup. A Ph.D. physicist by background, he has dedicated the last 16 years of his life to exposing what is arguably the most flagrant government cover-up in American peacetime history.

Borjesson has likewise been involved from the beginning. As a producer at CBS in 1996 when TWA 800 was destroyed, she sacrificed her future at CBS to get at the truth. Together, they have produced a documentary that is compelling, convincing and, finally, deeply moving.

Jack Cashill and James Sanders exposed the corrupt TWA 800 investigation in their book "First Strike" - get it now at WND's Superstore

The producers made two strategic moves to force the media to look seriously at their conclusions. One was to rely heavily on the testimony of a half-dozen highly credible whistleblowers from within the investigation.

The second was to avoid politics. When James Sanders and I produced the video documentary "Silenced" on this subject 12 years ago and the book "First Strike" two years after that, we made the marketing mistake of identifying the logic of the cover-up.

That logic led to the White House. Sixteen years ago, in the home stretch of a difficult re-election campaign, Bill Clinton faced a problem very similar to one that Barack Obama would face in 2012. This is something the media did not want to know, let alone share.

An event took place that threatened the "peace and prosperity" theme of his campaign - specifically, the shoot-down of this doomed airliner with 230 people on board 12 minutes out of JFK.

Although the word was not used back then, the Clinton White House, with the help of a complicit media, rewrote the event's "narrative" to assure re-election. Again, as with Benghazi, that narrative was clumsily improvised almost on a daily basis.

Knowing the media had his back, Clinton responded much as Obama did: deny, obfuscate and kick the investigatory can down the road until after the election.

One central figure appeared in each drama: Hillary Clinton. She stood by Obama's side in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12 as he spun reality into confection.

Throughout that long night of July 17, 1996, she holed up with Bill and Sandy Berger in the White House family quarters, assessing their narrative options much as Obama did on Sept. 11, 2012.

By removing politics from the equation, Stalcup, who appeared in "Silenced," and Borjesson have attracted a fair share of major media attention.

In their well-researched recreation of the plane's final minutes, they wisely refrain from saying who pulled the trigger. But the evidence that someone fired missiles at the plane overwhelms the dispassionate observer.

In the 21st century the two hundred year-old propaganda that the American people control their government has been completely shattered. Both the Bush and Obama regimes have made it unmistakenly clear that the American people don't even influence, much less control, the government. As far as Washington is concerned, the people are nothing but chaff in the wind.

Polls demonstrate that 65% of the US population opposes US intervention in Syria. Despite this clear indication of the people's will, the Obama regime is ramping up a propaganda case for more arming of Washington's mercenaries sent to overthrow the secular Syrian government and for a "no-fly zone" over Syria, which, if Libya is the example, means US or NATO aircraft attacking the Syrian army on the ground, thus serving as the air force of Washington's imported mercenaries, euphemistically called "the Syrian rebels."

Washington declared some time ago that the "red line" that would bring Syria under Washington's military attack was the Assad government's use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against Washington's mercenaries. Once this announcement was made, everyone with a brain immediately knew that Washington would fabricate false intelligence that Assad had used chemical weapons, just as Washington presented to the United Nations the intentional lie via Secretary of State Colin Powell that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Remember National Security Advisor Condi Rice's image of a "mushroom cloud over American cities?" Propagandistic lies were Washington's orders of the day.

And they still are. Now Washington has fabricated the false intelligence, and president obama has announced it with a straight face, that Syria's Assad has used sarin gas on several occasions and that between 100 and 150 "of his own people," a euphemism for the US supplied foreign mercenaries, have been killed by the weapon of mass destruction.

Think about that for a minute. As unfortunate as is any death from war, is 100-150 deaths "mass destruction?" According to low-ball estimates, the US-sponsored foreign mercenary invasion of Syria has cost 93,000 lives, of which 150 deaths amounts to 0.0016 or sixteen hundredths of one percent.

In other words, 92,850 of the deaths did not cross the "red line." But 150 did, allegedly.

Yes, I know. Washington's position makes no sense. But when has it ever made any sense?

It's standard operating procedure for the FBI to conduct an internal investigation when an agent shoots a suspect. Questions are being raised, though, after a report found that every single intentional shooting in the past 20 years was deemed 'justified.'

Between 1993 and early 2011 FBI agents fatally shot 70 people and wounded approximately 80 others. In no incident, including one that led to a $1.3 million payout for a victim wrongfully identified as a bank robber, was an agent wrong to fire their weapon. The records were obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"The FBI takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally," an FBI spokesman said, adding that there have been no improper intentional shootings since 2011.

The FBI investigation into the death of Ibragim Todashev a Chechen man connected to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is still ongoing. Todashev was fatally shot during an interview with FBI agents. Since the May 22 incident, unnamed agents have told media outlets Todashev threatened them with a knife, broomstick or metal pipe before the bureau admitted he was unarmed after all.

Tim Murphy, a former deputy director of the FBI, told the Times that agents are generally older with more experience than the average police officer. He said officials plan to go into a situation with an "overwhelming presence," which may help cut down on the number of shots fired.