A Look At A The NSA's Intelligence Program That Targets Terror Cells

FOX News: Inside the government's secret NSA program to target terrorists

EXCLUSIVE: Relentless attacks on American military personnel at the height of the Iraq war made the U.S. intelligence community confront a dire problem: They needed real-time intelligence to take Al Qaeda off the battlefield and dismantle its bomb-making factories.

This realization was the start of a highly secretive program, developed by the National Security Agency, to put NSA specialists on the battlefield in order to send “near real-time” intelligence to the troops so they could avoid ambushes and root out insurgents. For the first time, going in depth with Fox News, senior NSA leadership is speaking publicly about that program, called the Real Time Regional Gateway or RT-RG.

"Starting in 2005, we started seeing a big uptick in casualties caused by IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and ambushes," NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett told Fox News. The RT-RG program created to combat those attacks, he said, “was really a complete change in how we provided signals intelligence support to the tactical war fighter.”

Read more ....

WNU Editor: U.S. General McChrystal is the commander who is credited for implementing this program .... but it was disbanded when the U.S. left Iraq in 2011. Apparently this was a very effective program, and when terminated had an adverse impact (for Iraqi intelligence and the military) to track and monitor militant cells.

The CIA Admits That It Blew It On Saddam’s WMD

Iraq: How The CIA Says It Blew It On Saddam’s WMD -- Mark Thompson, Time

Now that we’re out of Iraq, the CIA has come clean on how it came to be bamboozled about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ferrets over at the National Security Archive (NSA) petitioned for, and got, the CIA’s equivalent of the dog-ate-my-homework (technically, the NSA obtained this document under a mandatory-declassification-review request it made in 2006, which can be faster [It still took six years!] than an FOIA request, if the requester has sufficient details on a specific document).

Read more ....

Update: A Classified CIA Mea Culpa on Iraq -- Foreign Policy

My Comment: No one is fired. No one is punished or demoted. No one is held accountable for this screw-up that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands. No one and nothing.

But what makes me even more mad is that this incredible CIA "mea-culpa" is only being covered by a handful in the press .... giving an impression that after all of this war and coverage .... in the end no one really cares.

The Secret American Army In Iraq

From Strategy Page:

The United States now has thousands of spies inside Iraq. This didn't happen overnight. For the last five years, the U.S. has been building an informant network there. This sort of thing takes time, and knowledge of how Arab culture works, and how to work it. The U.S. Army Special Forces, the CIA, reservist cops and Israel were key components. The results (mostly classified) have been impressive. For example, last year, tips from Iraqis led to the discovery of 6,963 weapons caches, plus similar information on safe houses and terrorists themselves. During the first half of 2009, tips led to finding nearly 5,000 weapons caches.

Read more ....

My Comment: One of my first posts in this blog was a rant on what I felt was an absence of intelligence resources in Iraq. Things have clearly changed in the past year.