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Inspector General: Dept. of Justice Is Misreporting Terror Statistics

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A follow-up to a 2007 audit released Monday by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that DOJ did not accurately report terrorism-related statistics in 24 of the 26 categories auditors reviewed.

“For purposes of this audit, we considered the misreporting of a statistic as significant if the statistic was either overstated or understated by 10 percent or more,” the report stated.

The follow-up audit casts new doubt on the “number of terrorism-related cases filed, the number of defendants convicted at trial or by guilty plea, and the number of defendants sentenced to prison” previously reported by DOJ.

“These inaccuracies are important because Department management and Congress need accurate terrorism-related statistics to make informed budgetary and operational decisions,” the audit states.

Major inaccuracies in “terrorism-related statistics” were reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA), and the DOJ’s Criminal Division.

Read more from this story HERE.

Cruz Blasts Administration For Not Calling Ft. Hood Shooting a ‘Terrorist Attack’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

“Hiding behind ‘workplace violence’ and excluding evidence on [Army Major Nidal] Hasan’s pursuit of jihad will not make terrorism go away or properly honor the American heroes who were slain at Fort Hood,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) as he lambasted the Obama administration’s decision to classify the 2009 mass shooting as “workplace violence.”

“If we ever hope to defeat the ongoing threat from radical Islamism, we need to start by calling this terrorist attack on our armed forces by its name,” Cruz said in a statement Friday shortly after Hasan was found guilty on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder after he admitted waging a “jihad against U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Both the White House and the Department of Justice told CNSNews.com on Monday that neither President Barack Obama nor Attorney General Eric Holder have released any statements following the Fort Hood verdict.

However, both Obama and Holder commented following last month’s acquittal of George Zimmerman on murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin in self-defense.

“When Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” President Obama said, encouraging the nation “to do some soul-searching” about race.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Collected Non-Terrorism-Related Emails (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Reid J. Epstein.

The National Security Agency began improperly collecting Americans’ electronic communications that had no connection to terrorism in 2008, but the government didn’t learn of the problem until 2011, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper will release three documents that reveal the extent of the error, posting them on a new tumblr page.

The NSA revealed the improper collection of emails to the FISA court in 2011, which demanded a halt to the practice. The officials said the problem was technological and not malicious.

Congress, the administration officials said, knew when it authorized the surveillance programs in 2008 that some Americans would inadvertently have their communications intercepted.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

NSA ‘Goes After Man who Mocked Agency’

By Joe Kovacs.

The National Security Agency, the secretive federal department under fire for spying on U.S. citizens, is now accused of crushing the free-speech rights of a businessman clowning around about the NSA.

LibertyManiacs.com, a company that markets “freedom products for liberty lovers,” says the NSA is using a claim of copyright infringement to stop it from selling T-shirts and other products making fun of the Big Brother agency.

“Two months ago the NSA’s lawyers came after our parodies of the rogue agency and forced our host to take them down,” the company said Friday on its Facebook page.

At issue is use of the NSA logo, which was partially altered by LibertyManiacs owner Dan McCall. He kept the name of the agency and most of the artwork intact, but changed the bottom portion from “United States of America” to the laugh-inspiring “Peeping while you’re sleeping.”

Underneath the doctored logo is the phrase “The NSA, the only part of government that actually listens.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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NSA collected thousands of emails from Americans, rebuked by court

By Fox News.

The National Security Agency was rebuked by a secret court in 2011 for collecting thousands of emails and other online details from Americans with no ties to terrorism, according to court opinions which were declassified for the first time on Wednesday.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of declassifying more than 100 pages of documents, amid the escalating public debate about government surveillance programs. The release comes several days after a report showed that the NSA had violated privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times.

Some of those incidents were minor, but the documents released Wednesday detail major compliance problems.

In 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was notified of a problem involving “upstream collection,” which is the collection of Internet traffic outside of the service providers. The NSA was collecting bundled email communications under a provision which focuses on foreign Internet traffic. The NSA, though, was not effectively segregating all the traffic from Americans.

The court rebuked the NSA for the violation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Glenn Greenwald’s Partner Detained at Heathrow Airport for Nine Hours

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Photo Credit: Janine Gibson

Photo Credit: Janine Gibson

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London’s Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

Since 5 June, Greenwald has written a series of stories revealing the NSA’s electronic surveillance programmes, detailed in thousands of files passed to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian has also published a number of stories about blanket electronic surveillance by Britain’s GCHQ, also based on documents from Snowden.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jihadist Leader to U.S.: ‘Islam is Coming’

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Photo Credit: WNDDuring a radio interview Sunday, a representative of al-Qaida in the Gaza Strip sent a message to the United States: “Islam is coming and there is no other choice.”

That sentiment was expressed by Abu Saqer, leader of Jihadiya Salafiya in the Gaza Strip, speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio.

Jihadiya Salafiya represents al-Qaida in the Gaza Strip.

Saqer further stated that after battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the thousands of foreign jihadists currently in Syria could turn their ire on what he called the many other “enemies of Islam,” including Israel and the United States.

Saqer did not say the spread of Islam in the U.S. will come through violence.

Read more from this story HERE.

CIA Official Warns of Syrian Jihadist Threat to US

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JERUSALEM – At least 6,000 jihadist rebels in Syria, many affiliated with al-Qaida, now pose a major security risk to the United States and Europe, according to Obama administration officials and Mideast experts.

Most of the news coverage of the emerging threat fails to mention U.S. and Western support, including weapons transfers, to the Syrian rebels. Al-Qaida-linked groups reportedly are prominent among the rebel ranks.

On Tuesday, Michael Morell, the Central Intelligence Agency’s second-in-command, warned in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that al-Qaida groups in Syria, along with the civil war itself, pose the greatest threat to U.S. national security.

The Wall Street Journal reported Morell said there are now more foreigners flowing into Syria each month to fight with al-Qaida-affiliated groups than there were going to Iraq to fight with al-Qaida at the height of the war there.

Meanwhile, according to UPI, Matthew G. Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, stated Syria “has become really the predominant jihadist battlefield in the world.”

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Carney: ‘No Question’ Al-Qaeda On the Run (+audio)

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Photo Credit: APBy Elizabeth Harrington. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said there is “no question” that al-Qaeda is on the run, even though U.S. outposts remain closed due to terror threats throughout the world.

“We do stand by that,” Carney said on Tuesday when asked if he stands by his previous comments that al-Qaeda has been weakened despite the recent threat, according to the pool report.

“There’s no question that core al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been severely diminished,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama’s ‘Victory’ Over Terror

By Michael Widlanski. “Al-Qaeda is on the run, and Osama Bin-Laden is dead,” declared President Barack Obama (in almost identical language) at more than a dozen campaign appearances and major policy speeches in the last year.

But when America closes embassies in more than 20 countries for fear of terror, it sends a very strong message that America, not Al-Qaeda, is on the run.

Britain, which made tremendous intelligence discoveries about Al-Qaida in Arabia and Yemen (some of which Obama aides endangered with credit-taking leaks), only closed its own embassy in Yemen, not in 24 countries.

“Al-Qaida is not dead, but is alive and kicking, and it has merely changed its form,” observed Professor Uzi Rabi, head of Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Several Israeli experts have said that Western governments must be alert to “terror chatter” but also have to be careful that they do not grant terrorists a victory by inflicting damage on their own countries by reacting recklessly to what may be a terrorist feint. Read more from this story HERE.

He Just Can’t Tell the Truth: Obama Tells Leno, “We Don’t Have a Domestic Spying Program” (+video)

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Making his sixth appearance on Leno — his fourth as president — Obama and his host stuck to serious subjects as the president promoted his economic and heath care policies, discussed terrorist threats in the Middle East, and defended National Security Agency surveillance programs.

“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said, describing the NSA efforts as “mechanisms that can track a phone number or an e-mail address that is connected to a terrorist attack … That information is useful.”

Obama also told Leno he’s disappointed that Russia granted temporary asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but said the two nations can still work together on other issues.

“There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality,” Obama said. “What I continually say to them and to President (Vladmir) Putin, that’s the past.”

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Gohmert: Obama Administration Acting Like ‘a Bunch of Cowards’ for Closing 19 U.S. Embassies in Response to Terror Threat

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe Obama administration has been accused of behaving ‘like a bunch of cowards’ after 19 embassies were closed in the wake of the al-Qaeda terror alert.

Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, recalled the September 11, 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton famously suggested in a Senate hearing that it was largely irrelevant whether the attack was the result of a terrorist plot or – as the administration initially claimed – an outgrowth of a spontaneous anti-U.S. protest.

‘It brings us back to the question that Hillary Clinton asked: “What difference does it make at this point?”‘ Gohmert said.

‘The difference it makes,’ he said, ‘is that if you will bother to find out exactly what went wrong, why you didn’t have security where you needed it, where you need security to shore up, what you can do to make sure that doesn’t happen again, you don’t have to close your embassies like a bunch of cowards that go running away.’

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Terror Threat Intelligence Not New (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy Bill Gertz

Intelligence regarding al Qaeda plans to attack U.S. embassies, officials, and interests last Sunday was known for months by U.S. intelligence agencies but was used only recently to trigger the closure of embassies and issuance of public warnings of impending attacks.

Al Qaeda “chatter” about coming terrorist operations, mainly against 22 U.S. embassies and consulates, and threats to attack or bomb officials in the Middle East and elsewhere was widely reported in classified intelligence reports over several months. The report said an attack was planned for Sunday, although no attack was carried out.

The intelligence was based on electronic surveillance of al Qaeda communications indicating some type of spectacular bombing or other attacks was being planned and would in fact be carried out very soon.

The timing of the administration’s announced closure of numerous U.S. embassies in the Middle East has raised concerns among some U.S. officials that the Obama administration is politicizing intelligence to distract attention from the Benghazi and other scandals.

“Why is this coming out now?” asked one official with access to terrorist threat data. “Is the administration trying to suck up news coverage with the embassy threats to distract attention from what the CIA was doing in Benghazi?”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Intercepted communication between Al Qaeda leaders prompted terror warning, source says

By Fox News

The terror threat that led to the closure of nearly two-dozen U.S. embassies and consulates resulted from intercepted communications between the head of Al Qaeda and the leader of its Arabian Peninsula affiliate, a U.S. intelligence source tells Fox News.

The confirmation shows just how high the alleged threat goes in the terror network and is the most specific detail to emerge over the nature and origin of the threat. The source said the communications were intercepted between Ayman al-Zawahiri — who is Usama bin Laden’s successor — and Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Asked about the claim, officials with the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence would not confirm the details of any such intercepted communications.

Earlier in the day, officials with the White House and State Department declined to provide further specifics about the nature of the threat. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney would say only that the threat potentially goes “beyond” the Arabian Peninsula.

Carney reiterated that officials view the threat, which also prompted a worldwide travel alert last week, as “significant.”

Read more from this story HERE.