Time: Outsourcing the CIA

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President Bush and Senate Republicans say they object to the Democrats' draft authorization because of provisions like making the overall intelligence budget public and creating a statutory inspector general for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Bush said last Thursday that unless these and other provisions that add Congressional oversight of the intelligence community are stripped from the authorization, he will veto it.

But does anyone seriously believe Osama bin Laden would be deterred from attacking the United States if he found out we are spending more on intelligence than everyone thinks? I called around to check with my former colleagues. "Who cares whether the intelligence budget is $25 or $75 billion," a recently retired CIA officer told me, bringing up only one real problem that bothers him. 'The entire budget is being flushed down the drain — into contractors' pockets.'

He has a point. With contractors rumored to make up 50-60% of the CIA's workforce it is difficult to tell who is running the place. The contractors' mantra is that the CIA needs more contractors to fix it. Management is too beleaguered and on the defensive to do what is really necessary — rebuild the CIA from top to bottom.

My ex-colleague went on to say that the problem is most evident in Iraq. Today in Baghdad a private contracting company, which I will leave unnamed, decides where CIA officers can go and who they can see. This may sound like inside baseball to a lot of people, but what it means is the contractor is in charge, essentially determining who the CIA's sources are. And the contractor makes no bones about it: his goal is to hold on to his contract, not whether the CIA gets Iraq right or not.

more:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1613011,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

The privatization of the U.S. military and intelligence by the Bush-Cheney regime is going to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Don't be too surprised if these guns for hire and private-sector political action types muck around in domestic politics.

After all, they did it before. The Carter Administration retired hundreds of former covert operators at CIA -- the same ones whose assassinations and coup operations were uncovered by the Church Committee. The clean-up of the CIA Directorate of Operations was intended to break up that part of the Agency that had been conducting "off the books" foreign and domestic political operations. Many of those fired weren't very happy about it.

These spooks banded together by David Atlee Phillips into an group that became the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers (ARIO), from whose ranks former CIA Director George H.W. Bush recruited a number, using money and resources of multinational oil companies, into a dirty-tricks unit of the GOP. They carried out operations that undermined Carter, including cutting a deal with factions of the Iranian revolutionary movement to keep American hostages during 1980 elections. These hostages were released immediately after the January 20, 1981 Inauguration of Reagan and GHW Bush.

Americans will again be presented with a choice. Either tolerate a recurrence of this sort of rebellion by right-wing covert operators and corporate sponsors of terrorism, or anticipate, expose and suppress it before it strikes again.

Not that we are not largely that already.

Let's hope that the extremes of the Bush-Cheney regime have finally broken down the wall of denial -- the "It Can't Happen Here" sort of rosy-tinted view long held by many privileged liberal elites.

The biggest danger is of cooptation of liberal elites. These are the same types that no sooner than they closed the books on the Church and Pike Committee reports, absolutely refused to do what was necessary in the late 1970s to protect the country from political dirty-tricks and economic destabilization.

The Carter Administration failed two critical tests in 1979 and 1980: then Energy Secretary Schlesinger talked Carter out of invoking emergency powers to deal with the withholding of retail gasoline supplies from the domestic market; the Administration also chose to do nothing in response to reports that George Bush, Sr. and William Casey were meeting with Iranians in France and Spain to broker a separate deal for release of the hostages. The refusal to act forcefully cost the Presidency and set up a period of Republican Party and transnational corporate domination we are reeling from today.

By the time they figure out that there are worse things than democracy it will be too fucking late. They should take a look at what happened to Germany and Japan and think it over.