Spook world - more than $50 billion for spies, 70 percent to private contractors

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1031/p99s01-duts.html

US Intelligence officials: $42.3 billion bill for spy services last year
The budget disclosure, the first since 2001, confirms that the bulk of money was spent on private contractors, sparking an outcry.
By David Montero

from the November 1, 2007 edition

Anyone wondering, in this age of global terrorism, how much money the US intelligence community spends on spy services was given an answer on Tuesday: $43.5 billion in 2007, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

(ADD ESTIMATED $10 BILLION FOR MILITARY INTELLIGENCE - SEE BELOW)

(snip)

The publication of the figure is a rare display of transparency. Government officials normally refuse to divulge intelligence budgets on the grounds of national security, as The New York Times reports this week. The intelligence budget has twice before been made public: in 1997 and 1998, the C.I.A. disclosed that its budget was $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion, respectively. But since the Sept. 11 attacks the Bush administration has refused to make similar disclosures, fighting legal challenges from several advocacy groups.

(a one-third increase in inflation adjusted dollars)

The figure does not include billions of dollars spent by military services on intelligence, the Times points out. This is only a partial accounting of intelligence spending, The Washington Post says. It includes salaries for about 100,000 people, multibillion dollar secret satellite programs, aircraft, weapons, electronic sensors, intelligence analysts, spies, computers and software.

(snip)

The Post puts the $43.5 billion tab into perspective: For comparison, last year's intelligence spending was about half the $91 billion President Bush is proposing to spend over the coming year on the Agriculture Department, and somewhat more than the $35 billion budget of the Homeland Security Department.

(Wrong comparison: agriculture budget consists mostly of subsidies, does not create underground world of private contractors. Might as well point out how Social Security dwarfs the official intel budget too.)

(snip)

A Defense Intelligence Agency presentation in May of 2007 showed for the first time, according to a June 2007 investigative report by Salon.com, that 70 percent of the US intelligence community's work is done by contractors. That means that, just as civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly hired to provide security and perform other quasimilitary functions, so too are civilians contracted to do intelligence work.

The figures revealed this week helps confirm that the US government is paying more money to contractors to do intelligence work than at any other time in history, reports Salon.com. 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.

What exactly did contractors do in return for 70 percent of $43.5 billion last year? It's anybody's guess, Salon.com's Tim Shorrock says:

Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

(much more of interest at link)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1031/p99s01-duts.html

In other words: We tolerate an off-the-books world of private contractors performing "services" (including operations, not just analysis!). Entities that have other revenue streams and possess the power of governmental agencies, but without oversight or control. Spook world is privatized and covert - a situation that absolutely invites self-appointed action and total corruption.

In a sense, we deserve whatever monsters this "community" generates.

Does the rest of the world?

We have a problem.

/ack

Who the hell is monitoring this beast of a thousand heads and a million tentacles?

:(

keep the funds coming.

CIA employees know who their boss is -- the American people. (At least, that's the idea.).

Spies for hire work for the highest bidder, whoever it may be. So when a spy is asked to choose between his patriotism or his loyalty to Halliburton, he's going to go with Halliburton.

WOnder how much of that went to Blackwater

Its amazing people can't see the agenda behind this. These guys want to radically change our country, eradicating representitive government and replacing it with corporate oligarchy. "Government so small you can drown it in a bathtub" doesn't actually mean less spending, it means more spending NOT going to the representitive government, but to unaccountable corporations, who make up the body of the new government structure.

You have to admit that George H.W. was an evil genius unlike his son.

The advance is not only that there is no oversight, you can add special flavors like companies registered in the Bahamas which are part of a Swiss trust which is administered by a Florida law firm. In short, you have no clue whatsoever who and what is behind it anymore and therefore it has become totally and completely impossible to blame the guilty who are now tucked away behind many layers....

Expanding on the idea of private contracters empowered to perform U.S. govt.-blessed intel ops, no scrutiny: These are also companies with other revenue streams and clients in industry and among the rich globally - where the hell does the line get drawn for mercenary operations unrelated to U.S. government contracts? Offshore dealings, money laundering, deals with other governments and their spook worlds, drug business, relations to mafia and organized crime orgs (many established "legitimately" as part of intel ops) - where the hell does it end? How does one keep operators in this complex from using their position to advantage in doing business everywhere: the stock market, for example? A director in one of these intel contracters can simultaneously sit on the board of any other corporation - you're telling me he'll forget what he knows from his functions at the intel contracter when making decisions at the "unrelated" corp? And we pretend to worry about "insider trading" - peanuts.

And you're right, GHW Bush historically was the spider in the web when this complex really got unmoored from even executive branch control, in the 1970s and 1980s, in reaction to the limited revelations at that time of CIA dirty ops. It all existed before, but its size has multiplied since then.

This is the world of parapolitics - completely uncontrolled, and where the real policy making is done by self-appointed quasi-state actors, many of whom have a sense of Higher Mission and personal invulnerability. It's at the center of all the messes we find ourselves in.

1. Blackwater
Has a massive revolving door with both the Pentagon, CIA and extreme right thugs from South America. They are basically a private army controlled by nobody and protected from the very top and have been known to provide services like illegal CIA rendition.

2. Marsh/Kroll
Has an amazing collection of companies under many different names like Control Risk Group, Kroll O'Gara Eisenhart, Defence System Limited and Alpha Firm and are a truly global revolving door which swallows former FBI from the US, SAS teams from the UK and even KGB/FSB from the Soviet Union. Paul Bremer as you might know was guarded by Blackwater, the favor was returned by Great Britian who used Control Risk Group (formerly owned and controlled by Paul Bremer) for the protection of their officials. What tangled web we weave...

3. E-Systems
This company seems to be one of the most amazing because people can simply switch from being an E-System employee to working for the CIA or NSA and back again. E-Systems is part of Raytheon, one of the largest Military Industrial Complex companies.

Let's not forget

Halliburton/Brown&Root

SAIC

Carlyle/UT

Blackstone

Dyncorp

Bechtel

Think-tanks like AEI, RAND and Heritage, CSIS

Kissinger Assoc., Giuliani Assoc., Trireme Investments (Perle) - everyone's got one!

From their excellent "Military-Industrial Gallery" page - visit it!
http://cryptome.org/mi-complex/mi-complex.htm

Speaking of the situation after 9/11, Weiner writes:

thousands of lives and help to restore some very damaged areas of the environment: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3052743

I guess that Halliburtan doesn't do wetlands restoration. :eyes:

Don't give them any ideas or they will put in a contract for wetlands "restoration" that ends up conquering the Arctic as a new source of water. Also, they'll offer to do school lunches out of surplus military vehicles. The possibilities are endless.

Apparently the NSA was created by act of Congress in 1947 and has grown like a cancer ever since, as Chalmers Johnson explains in Nemesis. At this point the intel outfits amount to an unconstitutional and completely undemocratic shadow government that not uncoincidentally parallels the expansion of voting rights. It looks to me like the spooks and their paymasters have used the NSA to take away whatever rights Congress, the courts or the Kennedys have tried to give. So basically we're a banana republic complete with our own Pinochet.

when most of us feed our taxes into it every year without a peep, and buy the inane rationalizations (it's necessary because of the ______ threat du jour).

It's easy to say it's just plain wrong and should be ended.

which is when this intel clusterf#ck got the upper hand. I suppose many people are clueless but they still voted JFK into office in 1960 and Kerry in 2004, so no, I don't think we deserve this shit at all.

But independently of any disputed scenarios about past events: allowing this tax-financed underworld - and it is a WORLD - is going to have predictable effects.

Paying taxes isn't exactly voluntary, as Henry Thoreau learned lo these many years ago (and don't forget that his aunt had to spring him from Concord jail by paying his overdue tax bill).

Scott Peterson... Britney Spears... maybe even one day Valerie Plame!

But yeah, the situation sucks.

which is that some enterprising attorney with a lot of money or backed by a well-financed, possibly foreign law firm takes up a 911 survivor's case against the PA or the state of New York and drives it all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue. Political ambitions would be helpful. At this point, word having gotten around and Junior being a sitting duck, I actually think it could happen.

would be Kerry in his next term. Kerry is a prosecutor, he's gone after the BFEE before, he's got plenty of motivation for nailing them, and so does his wife, who also has plenty of dough and I think would back him all the way.

The only problem is that they wouldn't want to put their families at risk which is a definite deal breaker. Also I don't think the Clintons would like it.

:banghead: