UPDATED US "National Security": Revealing the Sprawl of "Top-Secret America"...in 2007 (Shorrock)

UPDATED 1030 GMT: The Washington Post has now published the third and final part of its series, a look at the "intelligence complex" in Fort Meade, Maryland.



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On Monday, as The Washington Post launched its high-profile three-part series, "Top Secret America", on the vase intelligence network not only within the Government but amongst private contractors, we noted: "Much of this was known by close observers of US politics and foreign policy years before that, soon after — and indeed before — a US invasion of Iraq which was marked by faulty intelligence, wayward covert action, and a distortion of effective (and legal) policy at home and abroad."

For all the information put forth by Dana Priest and William Arkin, it is worth noting --- since the series does not do so --- those who had already documented the expanding sprawl of "intelligence" in and beyond the National Insecurity State. One of those reporters is Tim Shorrock, who published articles in Salon, Mother Jones, and The Nation between 2003 and 2007 and then the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

Shorrock's view of the Post series?

[They] their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence. They're eight years behind and still haven't caught up. Basically their stories are throwing big numbers at readers—such as the fact that of 854,000 people with top security clearances, 265,000 are contractors. But that's work that can be done by interns; there's virtually nothing in their series about the broader picture—like what it means to have private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our national security."

UPDATED The Perils of US Intelligence: A “Top-Secret World” Beyond Control (Priest/Arkin)
US “National Security”: More on the Sprawling “Top Secret America” (Priest/Arkin)

This is Shorrock's article, "The Corporate Takeover of US Intelligence",  from Salon in June 2007:

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.

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."

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. Aftergood and other experts also warn that the lack of transparency creates conditions ripe for corruption.

Trey Brown, a DNI press officer, told Salon that the 70 percent figure disclosed by Everett refers to everything that U.S. intelligence agencies buy, from pencils to buildings to "whatever devices we use to collect intelligence." Asked how much of the money doled out goes toward big-ticket items like military spy satellites, he replied, "We can't really talk about those kinds of things."

The media has reported on some contracting figures for individual agencies, but never before for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "significant majority" of the employees at two key agencies, the National Counterterrrorism Center and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, were contractors (at CIFA, the number was more than 70 percent). More recently, former officers with the Central Intelligence Agency have said the CIA's workforce is about 60 percent contractors.

But the statistics alone don't even show the degree to which outsourcing has penetrated U.S. intelligence --- many tasks and services once reserved exclusively for government employees are being handled by civilians. For example, private contractors analyze much of the intelligence collected by satellites and low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles, and they write reports that are passed up to the line to high-ranking government officials. They supply and maintain software programs that can manipulate and depict data used to track terrorist suspects, both at home and abroad, and determine what targets to hit in hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such data is also at the heart of the National Security Agency's massive eavesdropping programs and may be one reason the DNI is pushing Congress to grant immunity tocorporations that may have cooperated with the NSA over the past five years. Contractors also provide collaboration tools to help individual agencies communicate with each other, and they supply security tools to protect intelligence networks from outside tampering.

Outsourcing has also spread into the realm of human intelligence. At the CIA, contractors help staff overseas stations and provide disguises used by agents working under cover. According to Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was the inspiration for the character played by George Clooney in the film "Syriana," a contractor stationed in Iraq even supervises where CIA agents go in Baghdad and whom they meet. "It's a completely different culture from the way the CIA used to be run, when a case officer determined where and when agents would go," he told me in a recent interview. "Everyone I know in the CIA is leaving and going into contracting whether they're retired or not."

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Honduras: "Legitimacy" One Year After the Coup (Frank)

I always regretted that, because of demands on  our time and resources, we could not cover the 2009 political crisis in Honduras. The issues are far from resolved, as Dana Frank reports for The Nation:

A long, brutal year after the June 28, 2009, military coup that deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya, official Honduras is collapsing under the weight of its own illegitimacy. On the anniversary of the coup, the opposition took over the nation’s highways and bridges in overt resistance to Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo’s new government, while his own appointees are openly defiant of the slightest concession. The Obama administration, meanwhile, remains insistent that Lobo is the only path forward.

The anniversary of the coup started early in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, where the maquiladoras loom and enormous trucks rumble through carrying boxes of T-shirts and jeans for export from Puerto Cortes. Protesters from the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP), the broad national coalition uniting women's groups, trade unions, campesinos, the gay movement, indigenous people's organizations and human rights groups, shut down the highway at 8 AM. The whole operation was surprisingly low-tech: 200 people in red shirts loosely arrayed along a four-block stretch of the highway, waving banners, chanting and erecting makeshift barriers out of burning branches and a few tires. By 9 over 150 police had arrived, many in riot gear, huddling closely like cattle in the shadow of two trees in the median strip. More ominously, a truck carrying a giant tank of water laced with chemicals and pepper spray pulled up in front of the blockade; a commander informed the protesters that they’d be forced from the road in forty-five minutes. A half an hour later, though, most of the police suddenly trotted back to their truck and followed the tank truck back to San Pedro Sula.

In a complicated dance of countervailing powers within Honduras and beyond, Lobo is desperately seeking legitimacy, and thus forced to both simultaneously show force and restrain it. He vowed in his first days in office not to tolerate any road blockages or occupations. But the anniversary protests were too widespread, international attention too vigilant, to give Lobo much space to maneuver. "There are too many road takeovers all over the country today and not enough police for them to repress us all," a wholesome-looking young man in a FNRP baseball cap explained. Indeed, that same morning over 200,000 marchers occupied the main boulevards of Tegucigalpa, the nation's capital, as well. In El Progreso and Santa Rita, Choluteca and Santa Barbara, La Ceiba and Tocoa, protesters successfully blocked all the country's main arteries.

Tutored closely by Washington, Lobo is trying desperately to present his administration as a "government of national reconciliation." A so-called Truth Commission, unveiled in February with much fanfare, is supposedly investigating the transgressions of the coup but lacks enforcement power, covers only abuses before Lobo's time, and has been largely discredited by the resistance—which has launched its own, alternative truth commission.

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