Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Hostile Takeover

70% of the intelligence budget goes to mercenary private contractors.

Among other things, this assures that even if the Democrats win this year, the same people will be telling them what to do and deciding what to tell them about the world.

...if a foreign espionage service wanted to penetrate American military and governmental secrets, its easiest path would not be to gain access to any official U.S. agencies, but simply to get its agents jobs at any of the large intelligence-oriented private companies on which the government has become remarkably dependent. These include Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with headquarters in San Diego, California, which typically pays its 42,000 employees higher salaries than if they worked at similar jobs in the government; Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation's oldest intelligence and clandestine-operations contractors, which, until January 2007, was the employer of Mike McConnell, the current director of national intelligence and the first private contractor to be named to lead the entire intelligence community; and CACI International, which, under two contracts for "information technology services," ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the Army at Iraq's already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. According to Major General Anthony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal, four of CACI's interrogators were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for torturing prisoners...

Remarkably enough, SAIC has virtually replaced the National Security Agency as the primary collector of signals intelligence for the government...


Just to be clear, that's also Admiral Mike McConnell, who is also Director of National Intelligence. A Company man.

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