(WMR)—National Security Agency (NSA) director General Keith Alexander who, as commander of the US Army Intelligence Security Command, wowed visitors to his Information Dominance Center at Fort Belvoir with a Captain Kirk chair, bridge of the starship “Enterprise,” and doors that made “whooshing” sounds, is now trying to claim credit for preventing terrorist attacks in the United States. Alexander is under intense congressional pressure that may scale back NSA’s current “collect it all” signals intelligence capture policy.
Alexander, who failed to prevent the Boston Marathon bombing, tried to take dubious credit for discovering that reports of a follow-on attack on New York City by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were deemed false because of NSA communications surveillance. Alexander told the Billington Cyber-Security Summit in Washington, DC, that NSA’s surveillance was successful domestically against ” threats this summer” but he did not elaborate.
An NSA source has told WMR that Alexander and his predecessor, General Michael Hayden, were the cause of a number of terrorist attacks abroad because NSA did not classify certain Jihadist and Salafist groups as “terrorist” but merely as “rebels” and then “guerrillas.”
Although NSA’s massive PRISM database and BOUNDLESSINFORMANT metadata intercepts are designed to identify phone calls made by individuals like the Tsarnaev brothers because of patterns of the Tsarnaevs’ calls to other individuals identified as having Jihadist sympathies in the United States and abroad, NSA did not forecast the Boston bombing. That is because those identified with Chechen and northern Caucasus Jihadist calls are not deemed as threats, even though NSA considers Russia a Priority 1 target for surveillance. Northern Caucasus Islamist groups are not considered as being terrorists by NSA. Alexander has done nothing to change the policy, still identifying in SIGINT reports anti-Russian Jihadist groups as “guerrillas.”
For example, after 9/11, a number of terrorist attacks in Russia by Chechen Islamist guerrillas were not taken seriously in NSA intelligence analysis reports derived from intercepts of Russian police communications because Chechen terrorists were called “rebels.” In 2003, NSA changed the description to “guerrillas” on the orders of Hayden. None of the NSA reports called the Chechen groups “terrorists.” The CIA, acting both independently and through George Soros’s Open Society Institute, provided assistance to Chechen terrorists operating in Chechnya and from abroad in Turkey, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Britain, Qatar, Dubai, and the United States.
NSA’s policy also extended to other northern Caucasus republics of Russia. Jihadist terrorists operating in Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachay-Cherkessia were cited as “rebels” and “guerrillas” and not terrorists.
NSA’s soft peddling of terrorists operating in Russia appears to be part of a strategy by NSA to ignore certain terrorist operations that are supported by the United States to harm Russia. On October 30, 2007, WMR reported the following:
“NSA’s sophisticated surveillance platforms ‘went dark,’ in an unprecedented manner, on unencrypted South Ossetia and Caucasus regional communications shortly before the Beslan incident [the September 2004 siege by Salafist terrorists of a school in Beslan in which almost 400 people, including school children, died]. That indicates that high-level parties in the U.S. knew of the attack in advance and did not want NSA intercepts to yield the identities of the terrorist planners and leaders.
“According to sources at the National Security Agency (NSA), hours before a group of Chechen separatists took 1,200 children and adults hostage at a school in Beslan, in the Russian republic of North Ossetia-Alania, NSA intercepts of INMARSAT (International Maritime Satellite) and cell phone traffic in the region ‘went dark.’ Analysts at NSA and the Medina Regional SIGINT Operations Center (MRSOC) in San Antonio, Texas had been monitoring cell phone and INMARSAT phone traffic in Beslan but all communications intercepts of traffic suddenly ceased.
“After seizing the school, the attackers, claimed to have been Chechen Islamist terrorists, confiscated all the cell phones of all the adults. They also insisted that all hostages speak Russian and not Ossetian or else they would be killed. After a three-day siege, Russian security forces stormed the school. 396 people, the majority of whom were child hostages, were killed in the siege. Seventy percent of the victims were Muslims. President Vladimir Putin’s aide Aslambek Aslakhanov said the attackers were not Chechens because they only spoke Russian. Freed hostages said the terrorists spoke Russian with heavy foreign accents.”
The similarities between Beslan and the Nairobi Westgate Mall massacre are uncanny. The mall shooters were said to be led by a British white woman who traveled on a fake South African passport and had access to unlimited amounts of cash, while other terrorists reportedly all spoke English and not Somali or Arabic.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2013 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
