AMONG the shocking facts thrown our way on tonight’s excellent NOVA documentary, “The Spy Factory,” are two that are nearly incomprehensible.

First, is the information that the National Security Agency (NSA) – the most secret intelligence agency in the USA – was monitoring calls to and from Osama bin Laden for several years prior to 9/11, and yet refused to completely share information with the FBI or the CIA. This could, according to all the federal experts interviewed here, have stopped the 9/11 plot cold.

The second is that much of the information on tonight’s show comes from former FBI agent Mark Rossini, who recently pled guilty to five counts of criminally accessing the FBI database for personal purposes. Before that, he had been the FBI’s man at the CIA, directly involved in the tracking of the 9/11 hijackers before they committed the heinous act. He was, he says, forbidden to share the information he had on them with his superiors at the FBI.

But the show is an indictment of the NSA – not of Rossini. The agency’s “crimes” are of the bureaucratic kind, focusing on their failure to stop or warn those who could stop the World Trade Center attacks and then using their power to spy on ordinary Americans. Yes, despite their massive failure, the NSA was given, post 9/11, the right by executive order to read our emails and monitor our calls through an AT&T station that picked out key words.

For example, if you sent emails discussing terrorism, or used a key word, your email was probably read. Ditto with phone calls – of which there are millions recorded – from the most innocuous, “Do you have the recipe for meatloaf,” to the most sexually intimate. Yikes!

As for Rossini, producers say he was unable to talk to them while employed by the FBI, but within a day or two of surrendering his badge, he spilled his guts. He admitted that when he discovered that the men who would one day become the hijackers had visas to enter the US, the CIA forbade him from telling the FBI.

“If we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau, I would have been violating the law,” he says. “I would have broken the law. I would have been removed from the building that day. I would have had my clearance suspended. I would have been gone . . . I can’t come up with a rational reason why I didn’t break the rules and pick up the phone and tell that the hijackers – or really bad guys – were in the US. And I don’t know if I’ll ever come to terms with that . . .”

Rossini said this two days after losing his clearance and his job as an FBI rising star for breaking the law and stealing files – of idiot private eye, Anthony Pellicano. Go figure.