Warlord
06-12-2013, 07:02 PM
Does anyone know much about this case?
Petty politicians are citing it as an example of how surveillance "caught" a "terrorist". He was supposedly scouting Mumbai ahead of the attack there in 2008 that killed 160 people and he was convicted in January and got 35 years!
But reading the summary of the case in The Guardian article below there are certain red flags. He was known to the FBI for years, had links to intelligence agencies, there was an "informant" etc. Usual stuff you expect to see in a classic sting operation of which we know from court documents over the last decade the Feds conduct on average 1 every month.
Read for yourself:
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Feinstein and Rogers have also pointed to the case of David Headley, who in January was sentenced to 35 years in jail for having made multiple scouting missions to Mumbai ahead of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 168 people. Yet the evidence in his case also points towards a British tip-off as the inspiration behind the US interception of him.
In July 2009, British intelligence began tracking Headley, a Pakistani American from Chicago, who was then plotting to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in retaliation for its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Information was passed to the FBI and he was thereafter, until his arrest that October, kept under targeted US surveillance.
An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. "That's nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That's not the way it happened at all," he said.
The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.
The Headley case is a peculiar choice for the administration to highlight as an example of the virtues of data-mining. The fact that the Mumbai attacks occurred, with such devastating effect, in itself suggests that the NSA's secret programmes were limited in their value as he was captured only after the event.
Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA's data sweeps behind his arrest. In a long profile of Headley, the investigative website ProPublica pointed out that he had been an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration perhaps as recently as 2005. There are suggestions that he might have then worked in some capacity for the FBI or CIA.
Headley was also, ProPublica found, the subject of several inquiries by agents of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. A year before the Mumbai attacks his then wife, Faiza Outalha, reported on him to the US embassy Islamabad, saying he was on a secret mission in India and was a "drug dealer, terrorist and spy".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/nsa-surveillance-data-terror-attack
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So now it appears they're using their own sting operations which they setup and provocateur through 'informants' to justify massive surveillance.
Cute.
Related: The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism
(http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?415539-The-Terror-Factory-Inside-the-FBI-s-Manufactured-War-on-Terrorism)
Petty politicians are citing it as an example of how surveillance "caught" a "terrorist". He was supposedly scouting Mumbai ahead of the attack there in 2008 that killed 160 people and he was convicted in January and got 35 years!
But reading the summary of the case in The Guardian article below there are certain red flags. He was known to the FBI for years, had links to intelligence agencies, there was an "informant" etc. Usual stuff you expect to see in a classic sting operation of which we know from court documents over the last decade the Feds conduct on average 1 every month.
Read for yourself:
-
Feinstein and Rogers have also pointed to the case of David Headley, who in January was sentenced to 35 years in jail for having made multiple scouting missions to Mumbai ahead of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 168 people. Yet the evidence in his case also points towards a British tip-off as the inspiration behind the US interception of him.
In July 2009, British intelligence began tracking Headley, a Pakistani American from Chicago, who was then plotting to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in retaliation for its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Information was passed to the FBI and he was thereafter, until his arrest that October, kept under targeted US surveillance.
An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. "That's nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That's not the way it happened at all," he said.
The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.
The Headley case is a peculiar choice for the administration to highlight as an example of the virtues of data-mining. The fact that the Mumbai attacks occurred, with such devastating effect, in itself suggests that the NSA's secret programmes were limited in their value as he was captured only after the event.
Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA's data sweeps behind his arrest. In a long profile of Headley, the investigative website ProPublica pointed out that he had been an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration perhaps as recently as 2005. There are suggestions that he might have then worked in some capacity for the FBI or CIA.
Headley was also, ProPublica found, the subject of several inquiries by agents of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. A year before the Mumbai attacks his then wife, Faiza Outalha, reported on him to the US embassy Islamabad, saying he was on a secret mission in India and was a "drug dealer, terrorist and spy".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/nsa-surveillance-data-terror-attack
-
So now it appears they're using their own sting operations which they setup and provocateur through 'informants' to justify massive surveillance.
Cute.
Related: The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism
(http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?415539-The-Terror-Factory-Inside-the-FBI-s-Manufactured-War-on-Terrorism)