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Ahead of 9/11 commemorations, National Security Agency reveals details of its role in hunt for Osama bin Laden
The National Security Agency is revealing aspects it never disclosed before about its role in helping the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly strikes on U.S. and Western targets including, most notoriously, the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that debuted this week, current and former senior NSA officials who were involved in the decade-long search for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the highly secretive operation unfolded before culminating in the 2011 raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had fled.
“I remember late night meetings in the fall of 2001, we’d sit around a table and say, ‘How do we find him?'” recounts Jon Darby, former NSA director of operations, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency. “And one of the early theories was a courier, somebody that’s going to be taking care of him. But that was 2001.”
Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmented,” with no more than 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees aware of the effort until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.
“So the government had decided to carry out this special forces raid. So what’s NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure there are no threats to those choppers that are flying in and on the way out,” Darby said, in an apparent allusion to the risk that the two Black Hawk helicopters that had secretly entered Pakistan’s airspace could be intercepted. “So we had people poised, you know, ready to provide any indications and warning of threats to those helicopters,” he said.
NSA aided Ukraine after Russia’s invasion
Natalie Laing, the current director of operations at NSA who was also interviewed for the podcast, offered an overview of the fundamentals of signals intelligence, the NSA’s core focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the imminence of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Signals intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets such as phone calls, texts, radio waves and other things that create digital data.
“[W]e collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had the plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works hand-in-glove with the NSA, were dispatched overseas to help Kyiv strengthen its cyber defenses.
“Cyber Command was able to send before the invasion, again, a small team over to Ukraine to help them look through their networks and point to some activity that seemed to be Russian activity there, so they could shore up their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.
She also explained how signals intelligence collected by NSA helped the U.S. government determine the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, whose illicit influx into the country American agencies have deemed a national security threat.
U.S. intel agencies pulling back the curtain more
Once so secretive its very existence was classified, the NSA has sought in recent years to pull back the curtain on some of its operations and to share more cybersecurity information with non-government entities and the public.
In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other American intelligence agencies – including the CIA, which started a podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was released in 2020 in an effort to demystify some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.
Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding the NSA’s activities follows the 2013 disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden of classified U.S. government mass surveillance programs, which ignited a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials have acknowledged did lasting damage to the reputation of the American intelligence community.
“Because it’s sensitive, we can’t talk about some of our work, but it’s time to start telling more stories that we can talk about, sharing more of that expertise, and highlighting these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, NSA’s Chief of Strategic Communications, said in a statement.
The NSA aims to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms through next month.
Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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