from latimes.com: Many of President Obama’s closest advisors have embraced a controversial assessment of one of the National Security Agency’s major data collection programs — the belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could have been prevented had government then possessed the sort of vast trove of Americans’ telephone records it holds now… In recent White House meetings, Obama has accepted the “9/11” justification, aides say, expressing the belief that domestic phone records might have helped authorities identify some of the skyjackers who later crashed passenger jets in New York, the Washington area and Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.