NSA helped out in drone strikes
Email, phone records used to find terrorists
WASHINGTON— The National Security Agency has been involved extensively in the U.S. government’s targeted killing program, collaborating with the CIA in the use of drone strikes against terrorists abroad, Washington Post has reported.
The report followed a review of documents provided by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden.
In one instance, an email sent by the wife of an Osama bin Laden associate contained clues of her husband’s whereabouts and led to a CIA drone strike that killed him in Pakistan in October 2012, the Post reported online Wednesday night.
While citing documents provided by Snowden — the American is hiding out in Russia after being granted asylum — the Post reported it was withholding many details about the drone-strike missions at the request of U.S. intelligence officials. The request cited potential damage to ongoing operations and national security.
The CIA-operated drone campaign relies heavily on the NSA’s ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of email, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, the newspaper said.
The NSA created a secret unit known as the Counter- Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell, or CT MAC, to concentrate the agency’s resources on hard-to-find terrorism targets, the Post reported.
The documents provided by Snowden don’t explain how the bin Laden associate’s email was acquired or whether it was obtained through the controversial NSA programs.
Those programs, recently made public, included its metadata collection of tele- phone numbers dialed by nearly every person in the United States.
The U.S. has never publicly acknowledged killing bin Laden associate Hassan Ghul, according to the Post. The al-Qaida operative had been captured in 2004 and helped expose bin Laden’s courier network, a key development in the effort to locate bin Laden. Ghul then spent two years in a secret CIA prison and returned to al-Qaida after the U.S. sent him to his native Pakistan in 2006.
U.S. forces killed bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout in 2011.