[Peace-discuss] a vital engine of endless war

[Barbara kessel]

IMAGINE THE OIL INDUSTRY SUPPLYING THE INTEL ON THE MIDDLE EAST AND
NIGERIA AND VENEZUELA!

Outsourcing Intelligence: How Bush Gets His National Intelligence From
Private Companies
    By R.J. Hillhouse
    The Nation

    Tuesday 31 July 2007

    The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq
War has been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater
USA, Triple Canopy and others provide security services against
military-level threats, and they regularly engage in combat.

    But what is not generally known is that the secret side of the
Iraq War and the larger "war on terror" is also conducted by private
corporations, fielding private spies. The reach of these corporations
has extended into the Oval Office. Corporations are heavily involved
in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most
important and most sensitive national security document, the
President's Daily Brief (PDB).

    Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the
intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations
and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in
US government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to
independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence
agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70
percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.

    For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with
private corporations, which run its support and management functions.
As the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than
70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit,
CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate
contractors.

    Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference
in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA
offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60
percent of the workforce of the CIA's most important directorate, the
National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of
human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit
corporations.

    Employees of private corporations - "green badgers," in CIA
parlance - provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA
operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies. They also gather
human intelligence on behalf of the CIA and analyze it, creating
intelligence products used by the intelligence community and also
shared with other branches of government.

    Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are
thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the
intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that produces the final document
of the President's Daily Brief.

    The President's Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical
analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence
community. Staff at the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB,
which is presented to the President every day as the US government's
most accurate and most current assessment of priority national
security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, "Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in US."

    It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the
assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying
intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the
intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated
the intelligence community that it's impossible to distinguish their
work from the government's.

    Although the President's Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it
is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR
with corporate logos plastered all over it.

    Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that
if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its
clients into the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at
this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have
analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the
system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.

    To take an extreme example, a company frustrated with a government
that's hampering its business or the business of one of its clients
could introduce or spin intelligence on that government's suspected
collaboration with terrorists in order to get the White House's
attention and potentially shape national policy.

    Or, more subtly, a private firm could introduce concerns about a
particular government to put heat on that government to shape its
energy policy in a favorable direction.

    To get us into the Iraq War, intelligence regarding alleged
weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully manipulated to
short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such
warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial
outsourcing in the intelligence community, even that fallible
safeguard has been eroded.

    Sources like "Curveball," the Iraqi informant who wrongly asserted
the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and upon whom the
CIA relied, are no longer needed. This is particularly frightening
when one considers that the "war on terror" is fought by a $100
billion-plus industry that has a vested interest in its continuation.

    The tools needed to close this vulnerability are available, and
they can be found in the private sector. Existing techniques could be
applied to monitor the intelligence community for any suspicious
activity to insure that no corporation could manipulate US government
policy in this way.

    Closing the gaps is simply a matter of the Director of National
Intelligence acknowledging the problem, then finding the political
will and leadership to implement a solution. Unfortunately, it will
probably take a public outcry to make this happen.

  -------