Naval War College’s own ‘NSA’ defends the other NSA

Once upon a time, before the age of Twitter and the rise of faux journalists on 24-hour cable television news networks, the National Security Agency would respond to exposés of its oftentimes-illegal surveillance operations with no response. The Public Affairs Office at NSA headquarters had a boilerplate reply to all press inquiries: “No comment,” which, on a rare day, might change to “we cannot either confirm or deny the story.”

All that has changed in the wake of the disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of some of NSA’s most closely held classified operations. No longer content to ignore press reports about its activities, the NSA, which has refined the concept of “offensive information warfare” into actual practice, relies on a cadre of three professors within the U.S. Naval War College’s National Security Affairs department, also called “NSA,” to carry the signal intelligence agency’s water in launching attacks on critics of NSA and journalists who write about the agency.

The favorite tool for this NSA media “war room” operation on the banks of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay is Twitter. Whether the target is journalist Glenn Greenwald, this editor, Representative Justin Amash (R-MI), former Vice President Al Gore, and the handful of NSA whistleblowers who have come forward, including Snowden, the War College’s “NSA” troika of professors—former National Security Agency officer John Schindler and his two sycophantic assistants, Tom Nichols and Stephen Knott—enlist the aid of a committed group of Twitter “followers” to launch vicious attacks against any and all comers. Their followers range from Charles Johnson of the peculiar website “Little Green Footballs,” who is a washed up former band member for the group “Chicago,” to former Tory member of the British Parliament Louise Mensch, whose only claim to fame is resigning amid the Rupert Murdoch phone tapping scandal.

The NSA² troika in Newport, Rhode Island can also rely on a few polemicists who masquerade as journalists. Chief among them is Michael C. Moynihan, a writer for The Daily Beast and the Jewish Tablet website, who once worked for a neo-conservative group in Stockholm called Timbro and served on the editorial board of a Swedish magazine called “Neo,” as in “neo-con.” Timbro has been associated with the activities of Karl Rove and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. Moynihan’s libelous screeds, some of which have been directed against this editor, are complemented by those of Joshua Foust, who claims to be a national security reporter, but who has collected pay checks from a Defense Intelligence Agency contractor. The Newport troika and their media allies can always be assured of the constant support of the website Business Insider.com. The site was started by DoubleClick founder Kevin Ryan, who also happens to serve on the board of the Nazi collaborator George Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, is close to outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and is a member of the always-suspect Council on Foreign Relations.

As acerbic and vicious as these pro-NSA “wannabe” journalists can be, they do not hold a torch to the caustic and defamatory Twitter feed that ushers forth from Schindler, whose media appearances on CNN, CNBC, and MS-NBC skyrocketed in the wake of the Snowden revelations and media commentary on them, claims to have been an NSA intelligence and counter-intelligence officer and a consultant for the FBI. In reality, his most significant position at NSA appears to have been the “Command Historian” for the Naval Security Group Command, the Navy component of NSA’s military branch, the Central Security Service. Schindler also claims Babelfish-like fluency in no less than 11 languages, including German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Albanian, and Arabic.

Schindler’s leadership role as chief NSA defender and inquisitor at the Naval War College appears to have the support of college president, Rear Admiral Ted Carter, who assumed command of the Navy institution this past summer. The Naval War College’s own official Twitter feeds often advertise Schindler’s latest screeds against NSA critics and whistleblowers. Schindler claims that his Twitter postings, postings on his blog 20Committee, and media comments are his own opinion. However, one homespun parody of Schindler’s blog, xxtwitterwarcommittee, takes Schindler and his fellow troika to task for violating the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits political activities by federal employees using government facilities on government time. The proprietor of the parody site suggests that an audit be carried out to match Schindler’s media appearances and Twitter activity to Newport base access and employee time card entries.

Schindler’s ethnic slurs against Roman Catholics of French descent have earned him other media criticism as well as seen in this article by the Justice Integrity Project in Washington, DC.

Julius Streicher was hanged after being convicted by the Nuremberg tribunal.

A typical Schindler attack is found in the following libel hurled at this editor found on the 20Committee blog. The attack likens the editor to convicted Nazi war criminal, propagandist, and curator of Europe’s largest collection of pornography, Julius Streicher.

“Above all, disregard Wayne Madsen, who did serve as a Navy cryptology officer some years ago, but who has left earth orbit altogether and espouses a conspiratorial worldview that would make Julius Streicher blush.”

What is particularly loathsome about Schindler’s vicious libel is that in 2006 this editor rolled out his German-language book, Moralischer Bankrott, which deals, in part, with the war crimes of the Bush-Cheney administration, in the very same building in Nuremberg where Streicher and his fellow Nazis were convicted. The event was attended by the German media and received accolades from German jurists, as well as politicians from the Social Democratic Party and Free Democratic Party.

Those who run the Nuremberg facility, where the Nazi war crimes trials took place, would take great exception to this editor, hand on the dock where the Hazi leadership sat, being likened to Julius Streicher. But with neocons, like Nazis, anything is fair game.

It is abundantly obvious that the Naval War College’s role in providing media response services for the National Security Agency is no mere coincidence. The war college, like other military activities, is expected to seek out its own non-funded revenue source and the intelligence budget is second only to the defense budget in doling out funds to national security “welfare” recipients.

The Naval War College’s National Security Affairs department has engaged in a number of non-academic “security” and intelligence projects, including providing support, along with the US Southern Command and U.S. embassy in Kingston (where the Special Collection Service maintains a surveillance post) to the 2011 Fifth Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Security and Strategy Conference held in Moneague, Jamaica. Present were national security and military personnel from Jamaica, Belize; Dominican Republic; Guyana; Trinidad & Tobago; Barbados; St. Vincent; St. Kitts; Dominica; Barbuda (oddly, the sister island of the twin island country, Antigua, was omitted); U.S. Virgin Islands; and the Bahamas.

WMR has sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Naval War College requesting all documents on all contacts between the war college’s National Security Affairs department and faculty and the National Security Agency. The effort has not been problem-free. The facsimile number for the FOIA coordinator listed on the Naval War College website was inoperative. The war college informed us that the fax machine had broken and was never replaced. An alternate fax number in the war college’s legal office was also inoperative. The FOIA request has been sent by Certified Mail. The 2012 FOIA report submitted by the Naval War College reported the sum total of all FOIA requests to the college for the year 2012: the whopping number of 6. We don’t expect our FOIA request to be lost in the paper shuffle.

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).