The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Intelligence
June 3rd, 2007We’re solidly into the post-mortem phase of the analysis now.
Via: Salon:
More than five years into the global “war on terror,” spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.
On May 14, at an industry conference in Colorado sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government revealed for the first time how much of its classified intelligence budget is spent on private contracts: a whopping 70 percent. Based on this year’s estimated budget of at least $48 billion, that would come to at least $34 billion in contracts. The figure was disclosed by Terri Everett, a senior procurement executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency established by Congress in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. A copy of Everett’s unclassified PowerPoint slide presentation, titled “Procuring the Future” and dated May 25, was obtained by Salon. (It has since become available on the DIA’s Web site.) “We can’t spy … If we can’t buy!” one of the slides proclaims, underscoring the enormous dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on private sector contracts.
The DNI figures show that the aggregate number of private contracts awarded by intelligence agencies rose by about 38 percent from the mid-1990s to 2005. But the surge in outsourcing has been far more dramatic measured in dollars: Over the same period of time, the total value of intelligence contracts more than doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.
“Those numbers are startling,” said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the U.S. intelligence budget. “They represent a transformation of the Cold War intelligence bureaucracy into something new and different that is literally dominated by contractor interests.”
This is not new. 1945 – 1947 the future CIA was a private business operating out of Allen Dulles’ investment banking office on Wall Street. “The Company” has always been private.
Likewise, the common idea that “the CIA controls the media” is also backwards. Skull & Bones member Henry Luce started Time magazine long before the CIA was started by bonesmen.
Alek’s comment is one of the best I have seen, the “military/industrial/intelligence” complex has always been privatized but the breakthroughs in technology have now made it synergistically more dangerous. The stock market, at the real money level, is nothing but insider trading – – that’s why they make such a big show trial out of bullshit cases like Martha Stewart. They couldn’t even resist insider trading on 911, knowing of course that the “investigation” of same would result in exactly what it did result in . . . .
Well, more reason than ever to find someplace so out of the way that its inconvenient for anyone to bother with you. One thing I’ve noticed is that when it gets inconvenient then they usually ignore. Its when its “efficient” or “cost effective” that things get ugly.
It just hit me.
“The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Intelligence”
Is that not the most oxymoronic, yet true, statement you’ve heard lately?