[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] When war goes corporate

[Bill Totten]

Grave threats to our national security may now include the mass 
privatization of US intelligence and military operations.

by Chalmers Johnson

www.salon.com (July 31 2008)


Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military-industrial 
complex" means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a 
politician mention it. President Dwight D Eisenhower introduced the idea 
to the public in his farewell address of January 17 1961. "Our military 
organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my 
predecessors in peacetime", he said, "or indeed by the fighting men of 
World War II and Korea ... We have been compelled to create a permanent 
armaments industry of vast proportions ... We must not fail to 
comprehend its grave implications ... We must guard against the 
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the 
military-industrial complex".

Although Eisenhower's reference to the military- industrial complex is, 
by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted influence" has, 
I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little 
serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military- 
industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental 
secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive 
citizens, and how it degrades our constitutional structure of checks and 
balances.

 From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt was building up his "arsenal of democracy", down to the 
present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more 
or less equitable relations - often termed a "partnership" - between the 
high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and 
privately owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. 
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first 
emerged, these relations were never equitable.

In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public 
still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the 
way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role 
in the newly emerging relationship was played by the official 
governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president, FDR 
sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further 
legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as 
allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of 
fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as a 
way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making. In 
the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt's use of public-private 
"partnerships" to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally 
overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. 
Although he was himself an implacable enemy of fascism, a few people 
thought that the president nonetheless was coming close to copying some 
of its key institutions. The leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the 
neo- Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued that it should more 
appropriately be called "corporatism" because it was a merger of state 
and corporate power.

Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship 
between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously 
sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the 
separation of powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less 
amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than those of a public 
institution, public-private collaborative relationships afford the 
private sector an added measure of security from such scrutiny. These 
concerns were ultimately swamped by enthusiasm for the war effort and 
the postwar era of prosperity that the war produced.

Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big 
business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the 
interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. (See Thomas 
Frank's book "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" [2008], for a 
superb analysis of Ronald Reagan's slogan "government is not a solution 
to our problem, government is the problem".) Its objectives have long 
been to discredit what it called "big government", while capturing for 
private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in 
national defense. It may be understood as a slow-burning reaction to 
what American conservatives believed to be the socialism of the New Deal.

Perhaps the country's leading theorist of democracy, Sheldon S Wolin, 
has written a book, "Democracy Incorporated" (2008), on what he calls 
"inverted totalitarianism" - the rise in the US of totalitarian 
institutions of conformity and regimentation shorn of the police 
repression of the earlier German, Italian, and Soviet forms. He warns of 
"the expansion of private (that is, mainly corporate) power and the 
selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being 
of the citizenry". He also decries the degree to which the so-called 
privatization of governmental activities has insidiously undercut our 
democracy, leaving us with the widespread belief that government is no 
longer needed and that, in any case, it is not capable of performing the 
functions we have entrusted to it.

Wolin writes:

"The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady 
evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, 
even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of 
American politics and its political culture, from a system in which 
democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major 
contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of 
the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled."

Mercenaries at work

The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World War II 
or even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now fully 
ascendant. The uniformed air, land and naval forces of the country as 
well as its intelligence agencies, including the CIA (Central 
Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the DIA 
(Defense Intelligence Agency), and even clandestine networks entrusted 
with the dangerous work of penetrating and spying on terrorist 
organizations are all dependent on hordes of "private contractors". In 
the context of governmental national security functions, a better term 
for these might be "mercenaries" working in private for profit-making 
companies.

Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and the leading authority on 
this subject, sums up this situation devastatingly in his new book, 
"Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing" (2008). 
The following quotes are a précis of some of his key findings:

"In 2006 ... the cost of America's spying and surveillance activities 
outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about seventy percent 
of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each year on foreign 
and domestic intelligence ... [The] number of contract employees now 
exceeds [the CIA's] full-time workforce of 17,500 ... Contractors make 
up more than half the workforce of the CIA's National Clandestine 
Service (formerly the Directorate of Operations), which conducts covert 
operations and recruits spies abroad ...

"To feed the NSA's insatiable demand for data and information 
technology, the industrial base of contractors seeking to do business 
with the agency grew from 144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in 
2006 ... At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in 
charge of launching and maintaining the nation's photoreconnaissance and 
eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed of 
contract employees working for [private] companies ... With an estimated 
$8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC [intelligence 
community], contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at 
the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the 
most privatized part of the intelligence community ...

"If there's one generalization to be made about the NSA's outsourced IT 
[information technology] programs, it is this: they haven't worked very 
well, and some have been spectacular failures ... In 2006, the NSA was 
unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting ... As a 
result, more than ninety percent of the information it was gathering was 
being discarded without being translated into a coherent and 
understandable format; only about five percent was translated from its 
digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis.

"The key phrase in the new counterterrorism lexicon is 'public-private 
partnerships' ... In reality, 'partnerships' are a convenient cover for 
the perpetuation of corporate interests".


Several inferences can be drawn from Shorrock's shocking exposé. One is 
that 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 US 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. It is the NSA's largest contractor, and that agency is today 
the company's single largest customer.

There are literally thousands of other profit-making enterprises that 
work to supply the government with so-called intelligence needs, 
sometimes even bribing congressmen to fund projects that no one in the 
executive branch actually wants. This was the case with Congressman 
Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Republican of California's 50th District, who, 
in 2006, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in federal prison for 
soliciting bribes from defense contractors. One of the bribers, Brent 
Wilkes, snagged a $9.7 million contract for his company, ADCS 
("Automated Document Conversion Systems"), to computerize the 
century-old records of the Panama Canal dig!

A country drowning in euphemisms

The United States has long had a sorry record when it comes to 
protecting its intelligence from foreign infiltration, but the situation 
today seems particularly perilous. One is reminded of the case described 
in the book by Robert Lindsey, "The Falcon and the Snowman" (1979), made 
into a 1985 film of the same name. It tells the true story of two young 
Southern Californians, one with a high security clearance working for 
the defense contractor TRW (dubbed "RTX" in the film), and the other a 
drug addict and minor smuggler. The TRW employee is motivated to act by 
his discovery of a misrouted CIA document describing plans to overthrow 
the prime minister of Australia, and the other by a need for money to 
pay for his addiction.

They decide to get even with the government by selling secrets to the 
Soviet Union and are exposed by their own bungling. Both are sentenced 
to prison for espionage. The message of the book (and film) lies in the 
ease with which they betrayed their country - and how long it took 
before they were exposed and apprehended. Today, thanks to the 
staggering over-privatization of the collection and analysis of foreign 
intelligence, the opportunities for such breaches of security are 
widespread.

I applaud Shorrock for his extraordinary research into an almost 
impenetrable subject using only openly available sources. There is, 
however, one aspect of his analysis with which I differ. This is his 
contention that the wholesale takeover of official intelligence 
collection and analysis by private companies is a form of "outsourcing". 
This term is usually restricted to a business enterprise buying goods 
and services that it does not want to manufacture or supply in-house. 
When it is applied to a governmental agency that turns over many, if not 
all, of its key functions to a risk-averse company trying to make a 
return on its investment, "outsourcing" simply becomes a euphemism for 
mercenary activities.

As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature, 
observed in the New York Review of Books:

"The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, 
DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful 
displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the 
stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have 
much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable 
to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, 
that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection."

Euphemisms are words intended to deceive. The United States is already 
close to drowning in them, particularly new words and terms devised, or 
brought to bear, to justify the American invasion of Iraq - coinages 
Bromwich highlights like "regime change", "enhanced interrogation 
techniques", "the global war on terrorism", "the birth pangs of a new 
Middle East", a "slight uptick in violence", "bringing torture within 
the law", "simulated drowning", and, of course, "collateral damage", 
meaning the slaughter of unarmed civilians by American troops and 
aircraft followed - rarely - by perfunctory apologies. It is important 
that the intrusion of unelected corporate officials with hidden profit 
motives into what are ostensibly public political activities not be 
confused with private businesses buying Scotch tape, paper clips, or 
hubcaps.

The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to 
private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan's 
presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W Bush and 
Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this: The biggest 
private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government 
occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had 
the same anti-governmental and neoconservative motives as the 
privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies typically 
involved an indifference to - perhaps even an ignorance of - what was 
actually being done to democratic, accountable government in the name of 
cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is one of the 
strengths of Shorrock's study that he goes into detail on Clinton's 
contributions to the wholesale privatization of our government, and of 
the intelligence agencies in particular.

Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and offer 
a large share of public expenditures to the private sector with the 
creation in 1982 of the "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control". In 
charge of the survey, which became known as the "Grace Commission", he 
named the conservative businessman J Peter Grace Jr, chairman of the W R 
Grace Corporation, one of the world's largest chemical companies - 
notorious for its production of asbestos and its involvement in numerous 
anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also had a long history of 
investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was deeply committed to 
undercutting what he saw as leftist unions, particularly because they 
often favored state-led economic development.

The Grace Commission's actual achievements were modest. Its biggest was 
undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight railroad for 
the Northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on this front during 
the first Bush's administration, but Bill Clinton returned to 
privatization with a vengeance.

According to Shorrock:

"Bill Clinton ... picked up the cudgel where the conservative Ronald 
Reagan left off and ... took it deep into services once considered 
inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and 
intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By 
the end of [Clinton's first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had 
been transferred to companies in the private sector - among them 
thousands of jobs in intelligence ... By the end of [his second] term in 
2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll 
and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it 
had in 1993."

These activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the Republicans 
had gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first 
time in 43 years. One liberal journalist described "outsourcing as a 
virtual joint venture between [House Majority Leader Newt] Gingrich and 
Clinton". The right-wing Heritage Foundation aptly labeled Clinton's 
1996 budget as the "boldest privatization agenda put forth by any 
president to date".

After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the 
process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were 
enthusiastic supporters of "a neoconservative drive to siphon US 
spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large 
corporations friendly to the Bush administration".

The privatization - and loss - of institutional memory

The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in terms 
of military and intelligence functions. The KBR Corporation, for 
example, supplies food, laundry and other personal services to our 
troops in Iraq based on extremely lucrative no-bid contracts, while 
Blackwater Worldwide supplies security and analytical services to the 
CIA and the state department in Baghdad. (Among other things, its armed 
mercenaries opened fire on, and killed, seventeen unarmed civilians in 
Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16 2007, without any provocation, 
according to US military reports.) The costs - both financial and 
personal - of privatization in the armed services and the intelligence 
community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of the consequences 
for democratic governance may prove irreparable.

These consequences include the sacrifice of professionalism within our 
intelligence services; the readiness of private contractors to engage in 
illegal activities without compunction and with impunity; the inability 
of Congress or citizens to carry out effective oversight of privately 
managed intelligence activities because of the wall of secrecy that 
surrounds them; and, perhaps most serious of all, the loss of the most 
valuable asset any intelligence organization possesses - its 
institutional memory.

Most of these consequences are obvious, even if almost never commented 
on by our politicians or paid much attention in the mainstream media. 
After all, the standards of a career CIA officer are very different from 
those of a corporate executive who must keep his eye on the contract he 
is fulfilling and future contracts that will determine the viability of 
his firm. The essence of professionalism for a career intelligence 
analyst is his integrity in laying out what the US government should 
know about a foreign policy issue, regardless of the political interests 
of, or the costs to, the major players.

The loss of such professionalism within the CIA was starkly revealed in 
the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's possession of weapons 
of mass destruction. It still seems astonishing that no senior official, 
beginning with Secretary of State Colin Powell, saw fit to resign when 
the true dimensions of our intelligence failure became clear, least of 
all Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.

A willingness to engage in activities ranging from the dubious to the 
outright felonious seems even more prevalent among our intelligence 
contractors than among the agencies themselves, and much harder for an 
outsider to detect. For example, following 9/11, Rear Admiral John 
Poindexter, then working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense, got the bright idea that 
DARPA should start compiling dossiers on as many American citizens as 
possible in order to see whether "data-mining" procedures might reveal 
patterns of behavior associated with terrorist activities.

On November 14 2002, the New York Times published a column by William 
Safire entitled "You Are a Suspect" in which he revealed that DARPA had 
been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million 
Americans. He wrote, "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every 
magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every 
web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank 
deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend - all 
these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense 
Department describes as a 'virtual centralized grand database'". This 
struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the 
Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the 
following year, they voted to defund the project.

However, Congress's action did not end the "total information awareness" 
program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it 
through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz 
Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a 
violation of the privacy rights of the American public - for a price. As 
far as we know, Admiral Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness 
Program" is still going strong today.

The most serious immediate consequence of the privatization of official 
governmental activities is the loss of institutional memory by our 
government's most sensitive organizations and agencies. Shorrock 
concludes, "So many former intelligence officers joined the private 
sector [during the 1990s] that, by the turn of the century, the 
institutional memory of the United States intelligence community now 
resides in the private sector. That's pretty much where things stood on 
September 11 2001."

This means that the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the other thirteen 
agencies in the US intelligence community cannot easily be reformed 
because their staffs have largely forgotten what they are supposed to do 
or how to go about it. They have not been drilled and disciplined in the 
techniques, unexpected outcomes, and know-how of previous projects, 
successful and failed.

As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure of the 
American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure because 
the Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized military filled 
with incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the running of a 
defeated country. Defense Secretary Robert M Gates (a former director of 
the CIA) has repeatedly warned that the United States is turning over 
far too many functions to the military because of its hollowing out of 
the Department of State and the Agency for International Development 
since the end of the Cold War. Gates believes that we are witnessing a 
"creeping militarization" of foreign policy - and, though this generally 
goes unsaid, both the military and the intelligence services have turned 
over far too many of their tasks to private companies and mercenaries.

When even Robert Gates begins to sound like President Eisenhower, it is 
time for ordinary citizens to pay attention. In my book "Nemesis: The 
Last Days of the American Republic" (2006), with an eye to bringing the 
imperial presidency under some modest control, I advocated that we 
Americans abolish the CIA altogether, along with other dangerous and 
redundant agencies in our alphabet soup of sixteen secret intelligence 
agencies, and replace them with the State Department's professional 
staff devoted to collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence. I still 
hold that position.

Nonetheless, the current situation represents the worst of all possible 
worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to 
alter the CIA's role as the president's private army, even as we have 
increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the 
private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, 
or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our 
government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on 
in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to 
pressure, penetration and manipulation of every kind.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/31/military_complex/print.html/


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