Private Military Contractors - Data Dump

[Ed Jewett]

Thank you, Austin. I was just about to post that when I discovered you already had.

But I have the right graphic...



"...Mr. Toy Safety: With 26 years at Hasbro and 4 years with Marx toys, I have worked with such figure lines such as GI Joe, Transformers, Star Wars and others. Most of these lines were targeted for the mass market but there were also collector lines for the real enthusiasts. I remember several conversations with a GI Joe fan when I first joined Hasbro about the quality of decoration on some of the figures. This provided a clear understanding of what the enthusiasts expect both from the mass market figures, as well as the greater detail and complexity from collector lines.The primary focus of any QA organization working with toys is to ensure they are safe... whether it is a concern over the safety of missile firing weapons on GI Joe or the potential for pinching the child's fingers when articulating the arms and legs. This requires rigorous evaluation of even the apparently simplest product. As you know, the toy industry is heavily regulated with quality expectations and the range of safety requirements becoming more complex every day....."

http://www.figures.com/databases/action....rticle=133

On the road today on the way to attend the christening of my second grand-child, listening to the news on a popular local AM business-oriented station, I was treated to a story about the local PC outrage and principal's job-threatening comments when a high school teacher silently and unobtrusively held up a sign "End War" while graduating seniors were applauded for having joined the military. As is so often the case, the next story provided great social commentary by accidental juxtaposition when the female newscaster went on to express subliminal disdain in reporting the story about a couple who left their child in a car while they went in to the casino to gamble and were arrested by local police for "reckless endangerment of a child."

[Magda Hassan]

They wouldn't even notice the irony Ed. Sad indeed.

[Ed Jewett]

‘Shocking’ Criminal Investigation: Air Force Says L-3 Spied on Military Communications Network

13th June 2010


“ … Illegal monitoring of traffic in the military communications network is almost unheard of, except in the case of foreign spies. It suggests a complete breakdown of ethical standards at L-3. … There was ‘adequate evidence’ that L-3 ‘committed theft.’ … “

Andrea Shalal-Esa | Jun 10, 2010

(Reuters) – A unit of defense contractor L-3 Communications Holdings (LLL.N) that has been suspended from receiving new federal contracts has admitted to monitoring emails to assist its commercial interests, according to a U.S. Air Force memo obtained by Reuters on Thursday. The Air Force memo said the company’s actions were inappropriate, adding “there is an ongoing federal criminal investigation” into the actions of the L-3 unit. “L-3 is cooperating fully with the government and has no other comment at this time,” the company said in a statement.

New York-based L-3 disclosed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday that it received notice from the Air Force that its Special Support Programs Division, formerly known as L-3 Joint Operations Group (JOG), has been temporarily suspended from receiving new orders or contracts from U.S. agencies amid a probe of alleged improper use of email.

The June 3 memo from the Office of the Deputy General Counsel of the Air Force said the U.S. Special Operations Command used a third-party vendor to audit email applications used at the command that were managed by L-3 JOG. The audit showed the L-3 unit “purposefully and intentionally” monitored emails of employees of L-3, workers with other contractors and U.S. government employees, it said.

The L-3 unit arranged to have specific emails copied to and kept on an L-3 monitored database, then released and sent to recipients in such a manner that neither the government, nor those whose emails were monitored, would know communications had been copied, according to the memo. “L-3 JOG says it used the SOCOM network willfully and deliberately in an attempt to discover whether its employees had shared its information with another contractor,” it said.

L-3 ADMISSION SHOCKS INDUSTRY CIRCLES

The memo raised eyebrows in Congress and industry circles.

“This is a shocking abuse of contractor discretion,” said Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson. “Illegal monitoring of traffic in the military communications network is almost unheard of, except in the case of foreign spies. It suggests a complete breakdown of ethical standards at L-3.” The memo also said L-3 obtained information tied to a competition for follow-on contract work and collected material that involved a bid protest to which the company was a party. T

he Air Force memo did not identify the protest, but L-3 in March 2009 filed a protest with the Government Accountability office against a nine-year, $5-billion logistics deal awarded to Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) by Special Operations Command. GAO, the congressional agency that rules on contract protests, said it dismissed the matter a month later after the command said it would reevaluate the submitted proposals. The new competition is still under way, and L-3’s contract continues through the first quarter of 2011. Lockheed declined comment.

“As a matter of policy, we do not comment on matters under government investigation,” said spokeswoman Nettie Johnson.

The Air Force memo said there was “adequate evidence” to establish that L-3 committed “criminal offenses in connection with obtaining, attempting to obtain or performing a public contract or subcontract” and added there was “adequate evidence” that L-3 “committed theft.”

An Air Force letter to L-3 informing it of the suspension said the defense contractor could submit information opposing that move within 30 days after receipt of the notice. A copy of the letter was also obtained by Reuters.

L-3, a provider of explosive detection devices and aviation products that had 2009 sales of $15.6 billion, said in its Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it was providing information to the Air Force. It said it could not assess the outcome or impact of the proceedings, and noted the Air Force was also considering whether to suspend L-3 Communications Integrated Systems LP, the parent of the special support programs division.

JP Morgan analyst Joseph Nadol forecast minimal impact on L-3’s near-term revenue, but said its ability to bid for the recompeted contract was a bigger issue.

“We continue to see the loss of the JOG contract as the largest risk … and L-3 may not be able to bid on the contract recompete as a result of the hold,” he said in an analyst note. He added an expansion of the investigation to the parent would clearly be “an important negative development.”

Jefferies & Co analyst Howard Rubel said the issue underscored the need for improved cybersecurity. The L-3 JOG contract is expected to generate about $450 million in revenue annually, contributing about 2 percent, or 15 cents, to per-share earnings, he wrote in a research note. Shares of L-3 Communications closed nearly 1 percent higher at $79.88 on Thursday, underperforming the broader market which was up about 2.5 percent.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Additional reporting by Karen Jacobs in Atlanta; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Sofina Mirza-Reid)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1024281020100610

Also see: Air Force Suspends L-3 Communications Holdings (LLL) Benzinga


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Domestic Spying, Inc.
by Tim Shorrock , Special to CorpWatch
November 27th, 2007


Cartoon by Khalil Bendib A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.

The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). These companies already provide technology and personnel to U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed for domestic surveillance.

The NAO was created under a plan tentatively approved in May 2007 by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Specifically, the NAO will oversee how classified information collected by the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other key agencies is used within the U.S. during natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other events affecting national security. The most critical intelligence will be supplied by the NSA and the NGA, which are often referred to by U.S. officials as the “eyes” and “ears” of the intelligence community.

The NSA, through a global network of listening posts, surveillance planes, and satellites, captures signals from phone calls, e-mail and Internet traffic, and translates and analyzes them for U.S. military and national intelligence officials.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was formally inaugurated in 2003, provides overhead imagery and mapping tools that allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the skies and space. The NSA and the NGA have a close relationship with the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which builds and maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground stations where the NSA’s signals and the NGA’s imagery are processed and analyzed. By law, their collection efforts are supposed to be confined to foreign countries and battlefields.

The National Applications Office was conceived in 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which Congress created in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The ODNI, concerned that the legal framework for U.S. intelligence operations had not been updated for the global “war on terror,” turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia -- one of the largest contractors in the spy business. The company was tasked with studying how intelligence from spy satellites and photoreconnaissance planes could be better used domestically to track potential threats to security within the U.S.. The Booz Allen study was completed in May of that year, and has since become the basis for the NAO oversight plan. In May 2007, McConnell, the former executive vice president of Booz Allen, signed off on the creation of the NAO as the principal body to oversee the merging of foreign and domestic intelligence collection operations.

The NAO is "an idea whose time has arrived," Charles Allen, a top U.S. intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal in August 2007 after it broke the news of the creation of the NAO. Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer, will head the new program. The announcement came just days after President George W. Bush signed a new law approved by Congress to expand the ability of the NSA to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the U.S. when the government suspects agents of a foreign power may be involved. "These [intelligence] systems are already used to help us respond to crises," Allen later told the Washington Post. "We anticipate that we can also use them to protect Americans by preventing the entry of dangerous people and goods into the country, and by helping us examine critical infrastructure for vulnerabilities."

Donald Kerr, a former NRO director who is now the number two at ODNI, recently explained to reporters that the intelligence community was no longer discussing whether or not to spy on U.S. citizens: “Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,'' Kerr said. ''I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.''

What Will The NAO Do?

The plan for the NAO builds on a domestic security infrastructure that has been in place for at least seven years. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the NSA was granted new powers to monitor domestic communications without obtaining warrants from a secret foreign intelligence court established by Congress in 1978 (that warrant-less program ended in January 2007 but was allowed to continue, with some changes, under legislation passed by Congress in August 2007).

Moreover, intelligence and reconnaissance agencies that were historically confined to spying on foreign countries have been used extensively on the home front since 2001. In the hours after the September 11th, 2001 attacks in New York, for example, the Bush administration called on the NGA to capture imagery from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon to help in the rescue and recovery efforts. In 2002, when two deranged snipers terrified the citizens of Washington and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs with a string of fatal shootings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked the NGA to provide detailed images of freeway interchanges and other locations to help spot the pair.

The NGA was also used extensively during Hurricane Katrina, when the agency provided overhead imagery -- some of it supplied by U-2 photoreconnaissance aircraft -- to federal and state rescue operations. The data, which included mapping of flooded areas in Louisiana and Mississippi, allowed residents of the stricken areas to see the extent of damage to their homes and helped first-responders locate contaminated areas as well as schools, churches and hospitals that might be used in the rescue. More recently, during the October 2007 California wildfires, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asked the NGA to analyze overhead imagery of the fire zones and determine the areas of maximum intensity and damage. In every situation that the NGA is used domestically, it must receive a formal request from a lead domestic agency, according to agency spokesperson David Burpee. That agency is usually FEMA, which is a unit of DHS.

At first blush, the idea of a U.S. intelligence agency serving the public by providing imagery to aid in disaster recovery sounds like a positive development, especially when compared to the Bush administration’s misuse of the NSA and the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) to spy on American citizens. But the notion of using spy satellites and aircraft for domestic purposes becomes problematic from a civil liberties standpoint when the full capabilities of agencies like the NGA and the NSA are considered.

Imagine, for example, that U.S. intelligence officials have determined, through NSA telephone intercepts, that a group of worshippers at a mosque in Oakland, California, has communicated with an Islamic charity in Saudi Arabia. This is the same group that the FBI and the U.S. Department of the Treasury believe is linked to an organization unfriendly to the United States.

Imagine further that the FBI, as a lead agency, asks and receives permission to monitor that mosque and the people inside using high-resolution imagery obtained from the NGA. Using other technologies, such as overhead traffic cameras in place in many cities, that mosque could be placed under surveillance for months, and -- through cell phone intercepts and overhead imagery -- its suspected worshipers carefully tracked in real-time as they moved almost anywhere in the country.

The NAO, under the plan approved by ODNI’s McConnell, would determine the rules that will guide the DHS and other lead federal agencies when they want to use imagery and signals intelligence in situations like this, as well as during natural disasters. If the organization is established as planned, U.S. domestic agencies will have a vast array of technology at their disposal. In addition to the powerful mapping and signals tools provided by the NGA and the NSA, domestic agencies will also have access to measures and signatures intelligence (MASINT) managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the principal spying agency used by the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(MASINT is a highly classified form of intelligence that uses infrared sensors and other technologies to “sniff” the atmosphere for certain chemicals and electro-magnetic activity and “see” beneath bridges and forest canopies. Using its tools, analysts can detect signs that a nuclear power plant is producing plutonium, determine from truck exhaust what types of vehicles are in a convoy, and detect people and weapons hidden from the view of satellites or photoreconnaissance aircraft.)

Created By Contractors

The study group that established policies for the NAO was jointly funded by the ODNI and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), one of only two domestic U.S. agencies that is currently allowed, under rules set in the 1970s, to use classified intelligence from spy satellites. (The other is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) The group was chaired by Keith Hall, a Booz Allen vice president who manages his firm’s extensive contracts with the NGA and previously served as the director of the NRO.

Other members of the group included seven other former intelligence officers working for Booz Allen, as well as retired Army Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, the former director of the DIA and vice president of homeland security for L-3 Communications, a key NSA contractor; and Thomas W. Conroy, the vice president of national security programs for Northrop Grumman, which has extensive contracts with the NSA and the NGA and throughout the intelligence community.

From the start, the study group was heavily weighted toward companies with a stake in both foreign and domestic intelligence. Not surprisingly, its contractor-advisers called for a major expansion in the domestic use of the spy satellites that they sell to the government. Since the end of the Cold War and particularly since the September 11, 2001 attacks, they said, the “threats to the nation have changed and there is a growing interest in making available the special capabilities of the intelligence community to all parts of the government, to include homeland security and law enforcement entities and on a higher priority basis.”

Contractors are not new to the U.S. spy world. Since the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the modern intelligence system in 1947, the private sector has been tapped to design and build the technology that facilitates electronic surveillance. Lockheed, for example, built the U-2, the famous surveillance plane that flew scores of spy missions over the Soviet Union and Cuba. During the 1960s, Lockheed was a prime contractor for the Corona system of spy satellites that greatly expanded the CIA’s abilities to photograph secret military installations from space. IBM, Cray Computers and other companies built the super-computers that allowed the NSA to sift through data from millions of telephone calls, and analyze them for intelligence that was passed on to national leaders.

Spending on contracts has increased exponentially in recent years along with intelligence budgets, and the NSA, the NGA and other agencies have turned to the private sector for the latest computer and communications technologies and for intelligence analysts. For example, today about half of staff at the NSA and NGA are private contractors. At the DIA, 35 percent of the workers are contractors. But the most privatized agency of all is the NRO, where a whopping 90 percent of the workforce receive paychecks from corporations. All told the U.S. intelligence agencies spend some 70 percent of their estimated $60 billion annual budget on contracts with private companies, according to documents this reporter obtained in June 2007 from the ODNI.

The plans to increase domestic spying are estimated to be worth billions of dollars in new business for the intelligence contractors. The market potential was on display in October at GEOINT 2007, the annual conference sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), a non-profit organization funded by the largest contractors for the NGA. During the conference, which took place in October at the spacious Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio, many companies were displaying spying and surveillance tools that had been used in Afghanistan and Iraq and were now being re-branded for potential domestic use.

BAE Systems Inc.

On the first day of the conference, three employees of BAE Systems Inc. who had just returned from a three-week tour of Iraq and Afghanistan with the NGA demonstrated a new software package called SOCET GXP. (BAE Systems Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of the UK-based BAE, the third-largest military contractor in the world.)

GXP uses Google Earth software as a basis for creating three-dimensional maps that U.S. commanders and soldiers use to conduct intelligence and reconnaissance missions. Eric Bruce, one of the BAE employees back from the Middle East, said his team trained U.S. forces to use the GXP software “to study routes for known terrorist sites” as well as to locate opium fields. “Terrorists use opium to fund their war,” he said. Bruce also said his team received help from Iraqi citizens in locating targets. “Many of the locals can’t read maps, so they tell the analysts, ‘there is a mosque next to a hill,’” he explained.

Bruce said BAE’s new package is designed for defense forces and intelligence agencies, but can also be used for homeland security and by highway departments and airports. Earlier versions of the software were sold to the U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center, where it has been used to collect data on more than 12,000 square kilometers of Iraq, primarily in urban centers and over supply routes.

Another new BAE tool displayed in San Antonio was a program called GOSHAWK, which stands for “Geospatial Operations for a Secure Homeland – Awareness, Workflow, Knowledge.” It was pitched by BAE as a tool to help law enforcement and state and local emergency agencies prepare for, and respond to, “natural disasters and terrorist and criminal incidents.” Under the GOSHAWK program, BAE supplies “agencies and corporations” with data providers and information technology specialists “capable of turning geospatial information into the knowledge needed for quick decisions.” A typical operation might involve acquiring data from satellites, aircraft and sensors in ground vehicles, and integrating those data to support an emergency or security operations center. One of the program’s special attributes, the company says, is its ability to “differentiate levels of classification,” meaning that it can deduce when data are classified and meant only for use by analysts with security clearances.

These two products were just a sampling of what BAE, a major player in the U.S. intelligence market, had to offer. BAE’s services to U.S. intelligence -- including the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism Center -- are provided through a special unit called the Global Analysis Business Unit. It is located in McLean, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the CIA. The unit is headed by John Gannon, a 25-year veteran of the CIA who reached the agency’s highest analytical ranks as deputy director of intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Today, as a private sector contractor for the intelligence community, Gannon manages a staff of more than 800 analysts with security clearances.

A brochure for the Global Analysis unit distributed at GEOINT 2007 explains BAE’s role and, in the process, underscores the degree of outsourcing in U.S. intelligence. “The demand for experienced, skilled, and cleared analysts – and for the best systems to manage them – has never been greater across the Intelligence and Defense Communities, in the field and among federal, state, and local agencies responsible for national and homeland security,” BAE says. The mission of the Global Analysis unit, it says, “is to provide policymakers, warfighters, and law enforcement officials with analysts to help them understand the complex intelligence threats they face, and work force management programs to improve the skills and expertise of analysts.”

At the bottom of the brochure is a series of photographs illustrating BAE’s broad reach: a group of analysts monitoring a bank of computers; three employees studying a map of Europe, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa; the outlines of two related social networks that have been mapped out to show how their members are linked; a bearded man, apparently from the Middle East and presumably a terrorist; the fiery image of a car bomb after it exploded in Iraq; and four white radar domes (known as radomes) of the type used by the NSA to monitor global communications from dozens of bases and facilities around the world.

The brochure may look and sound like typical corporate public relations. But amid BAE’s spy talk were two phrases strategically placed by the company to alert intelligence officials that BAE has an active presence inside the U.S.. The tip-off words were “federal, state and local agencies,” “law enforcement officials” and “homeland security.” By including them, BAE was broadcasting that it is not simply a contractor for agencies involved in foreign intelligence, but has an active presence as a supplier to domestic security agencies, a category that includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI as well as local and state police forces stretching from Maine to Hawaii.

ManTech, Boeing, Harris and L-3

ManTech International, an important NSA contractor based in Fairfax, Virginia, has perfected the art of creating multi-agency software programs for both foreign and domestic intelligence. After the September 11th, 2001 attacks, it developed a classified program for the Defense Intelligence Agency called the Joint Regional Information Exchange System. DIA used it to combine classified and unclassified intelligence on terrorist threats on a single desktop. ManTech then tweaked that software for the Department of Homeland Security and sold it to DHS for its Homeland Security Information Network. According to literature ManTech distributed at GEOINT, that software will “significantly strengthen the exchange of real-time threat information used to combat terrorism.” ManTech, the brochure added, “also provides extensive, advanced information technology support to the National Security Agency” and other agencies.

In a nearby booth, Chicago, Illinois-based Boeing, the world’s second largest defense contractor, was displaying its “information sharing environment” software, which is designed to meet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s new requirements on agencies to stop buying “stovepiped” systems that can’t talk to each other. The ODNI wants to focus on products that will allow the NGA and other agencies to easily share their classified imagery with the CIA and other sectors of the community. “To ensure freedom in the world, the United States continues to address the challenges introduced by terrorism,” a Boeing handout said. Its new software, the company said, will allow information to be “shared efficiently and uninterrupted across intelligence agencies, first responders, military and world allies.” Boeing has a reason for publishing boastful material like this: In 2005, it lost a major contract with the NRO to build a new generation of imaging satellites after ringing up billions of dollars in cost-overruns. The New York Times recently called the Boeing project “the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.”

Boeing’s geospatial intelligence offerings are provided through its Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which also holds contracts with the NSA. It allows agencies and military units to map global shorelines and create detailed maps of cities and battlefields, complete with digital elevation data that allow users to construct three-dimensional maps. (In an intriguing aside, one Boeing intelligence brochure lists among its “specialized organizations” Jeppesen Government and Military Services. According to a 2006 account by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, Jeppesen provided logistical and navigational assistance, including flight plans and clearance to fly over other countries, to the CIA for its “extraordinary rendition” program.)

Although less known as an intelligence contractor than BAE and Boeing, the Harris Corporation has become a major force in providing contracted electronic, satellite and information technology services to the intelligence community, including the NSA and the NRO. In 2007, according to its most recent annual report, the $4.2 billion company, based in Melbourne, Florida, won several new classified contracts. NSA awarded one of them for software to be used by NSA analysts in the agency’s “Rapidly Deployable Integrated Command and Control System,” which is used by the NSA to transmit “actionable intelligence” to soldiers and commanders in the field. Harris also supplies geospatial and imagery products to the NGA. At GEOINT, Harris displayed a new product that allows agencies to analyze live video and audio data imported from UAVs. It was developed, said Fred Poole, a Harris market development manager, “with input from intelligence analysts who were looking for a video and audio analysis tool that would allow them to perform ‘intelligence fusion’” -- combining information from several agencies into a single picture of an ongoing operation.

For many of the contractors at GEOINT, the highlight of the symposium was an “interoperability demonstration” that allowed vendors to show how their products would work in a domestic crisis.

One scenario involved Cuba as a rogue nation supplying spent nuclear fuel to terrorists bent on creating havoc in the U.S.. Implausible as it was, the plot, which involved maritime transportation and ports, allowed the companies to display software that was likely already in use by the Department of Homeland Security and Naval Intelligence. The “plot” involved the discovery by U.S. intelligence of a Cuban ship carrying spent nuclear fuel heading for the U.S. Gulf Coast; an analysis of the social networks of Cuban officials involved with the illicit cargo; and the tracking and interception of the cargo as it departed from Cuba and moved across the Caribbean to Corpus Christi, Texas, a major port on the Gulf Coast. The agencies involved included the NGA, the NSA, Naval Intelligence and the Marines, and some of the key contractors working for those agencies. It illustrated how sophisticated the U.S. domestic surveillance system has become in the six years since the 9/11 attacks.

L-3 Communications, which is based in New York city, was a natural for the exercise: As mentioned earlier, retired Army Lt. General Patrick M. Hughes, its vice president of homeland security, was a member of the Booz Allen Hamilton study group that advised the Bush administration to expand the domestic use of military spy satellites. At GEOINT, L-3 displayed a new program called “multi-INT visualization environment” that combines imagery and signals intelligence data that can be laid over photographs and maps. One example shown during the interoperability demonstration showed how such data would be incorporated into a map of Florida and the waters surrounding Cuba. With L-3 a major player at the NSA, this demonstration software is likely seeing much use as the NSA and the NGA expand their information-sharing relationship.

Over the past two years, for example, the NGA has deployed dozens of employees and contractors to Iraq to support the “surge” of U.S. troops. The NGA teams provide imagery and full-motion video -- much of it beamed to the ground from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) -- that help U.S. commanders and soldiers track and destroy insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation. And since 2004, under a memorandum of understanding with the NSA, the NGA has begun to incorporate signals intelligence into its imagery products. The blending technique allows U.S. military units to track and find targets by picking up signals from their cell phones, follow the suspects in real-time using overhead video, and direct fighter planes and artillery units to the exact location of the targets -- and blow them to smithereens.

That’s exactly how U.S. Special Forces tracked and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the alleged leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the NGA’s director, Navy Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, said in 2006. Later, Murrett told reporters during GEOINT 2007, the NSA and the NGA have cooperated in similar fashion in several other fronts of the “war on terror,” including in the Horn of Africa, where the U.S. military has attacked Al Qaeda units in Somalia, and in the Philippines, where U.S. forces are helping the government put down the Muslim insurgent group Abu Sayyaf. “When the NGA and the NSA work together, one plus one equals five,” said Murrett.

Civil Liberty Worries

For U.S. citizens, however, the combination of NGA imagery and NSA signals intelligence in a domestic situation could threaten important constitutional safeguards against unwarranted searches and seizures. Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, a nonprofit advocacy organization, has likened the NAO plan to “Big Brother in the Sky.” The Bush administration, she told the Washington Post, is “laying the bricks one at a time for a police state.”

Some Congress members, too, are concerned. “The enormity of the NAO’s capabilities and the intended use of the imagery received through these satellites for domestic homeland security purposes, and the unintended consequences that may arise, have heightened concerns among the general public, including reputable civil rights and civil liberties organizations,” Bennie G. Thompson, a Democratic member of Congress from Mississippi and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in a September letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Thompson and other lawmakers reacted with anger after reports of the NAO and the domestic spying plan were first revealed by the Wall Street Journal in August. “There was no briefing, no hearing, and no phone call from anyone on your staff to any member of this committee of why, how, or when satellite imagery would be shared with police and sheriffs’ officers nationwide,” Thompson complained to Chertoff.

At a hastily organized hearing in September, Thompson and others demanded that the opening of the NAO be delayed until further studies were conducted on its legal basis and questions about civil liberties were answered. They also demanded biweekly updates from Chertoff on the activities and progress of the new organization. Others pointed out the potential danger of allowing U.S. military satellites to be used domestically. “It will terrify you if you really understand the capabilities of satellites,” warned Jane Harman, a Democratic member of Congress from California, who represents a coastal area of Los Angeles where many of the nation’s satellites are built. As Harman well knows, military spy satellites are far more flexible, offer greater resolution, and have considerably more power to observe human activity than commercial satellites. “Even if this program is well-designed and executed, someone somewhere else could hijack it,” Harman said during the hearing.

The NAO was supposed to open for business on October 1, 2007. But the Congressional complaints have led the ODNI and DHS to delay their plans. The NAO "has no intention to begin operations until we address your questions," Charles Allen of DHS explained in a letter to Thompson. In an address at the GEOINT conference in San Antonio, Allen said that the ODNI is working with DHS and the Departments of Justice and Interior to draft the charter for the new organization, which he said will face “layers of review” once it is established.

Yet, given the Bush administration’s record of using U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on U.S. citizens, it is difficult to take such promises at face value. Moreover, the extensive corporate role in foreign and domestic intelligence means that the private sector has a great deal to gain in the new plan for intelligence-sharing. Because most private contracts with intelligence agencies are classified, however, the public will have little knowledge of this role. Before Congress signs off on the NAO, it should create a better oversight system that would allow the House of Representatives and the Senate to monitor the new organization and to examine how BAE, Boeing, Harris and its fellow corporations stand to profit from this unprecedented expansion of America’s domestic intelligence system.

Tim *Shorrock has been writing about U.S. foreign policy and national security for nearly 30 years. His book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, will be published in May 2008 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached at timshorrock@gmail.com.

This article was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Hurd Foundation.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14821


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See also The Journalists' Guide to Remote Sensing Resources on the Internet , Version 2.2 http://www1.american.edu/radiowave/earthnews.htm

[Ed Jewett]

I am working my way slowly through Shorrock's "Spies for Hire", a treasure trove but now almost out of date because of the tendency in the corporate world for re-naming, mergers, acquisitions, and the like. At this point, I am still basically scanning, mining it for other sources for the future in terms of books and so on. The reason for this post, then, is simply to note the author's acknowledgment of the assistance of one Raelynn Hillhouse, whose WikiPedia entry, related novel, and apparently-now-inactive blog are noted below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raelynn_Hillhouse

http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Outsourced-R-J-Hil...0765315777

[Austin Kelley]

Hearings Reveal Lapses in Private Security in War Zones

June 24, 2010

By Pratap Chatterjee
Source: Inter Press Service


Washington - Jerry Torres, CEO of Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, has a motto: "For Torres, failure is not an option." A former member of the Green Berets, one of the elite U.S. Army Special Forces, he was awarded "Executive of the Year" at the seventh annual "Greater Washington Government Contractor Awards" in November 2009.

On Monday, Torres, whose company provides translators and armed security guards in Iraq, was invited to testify before the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC), a body created in early 2008 to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in military contracting services in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Torres was asked to testify about his failure to obtain the required clearances for "several hundred" Sierra Leonian armed security guards that he had dispatched to protect Forward Operating Base Shield, a U.S. military base in Baghdad, in January 2010.

Torres didn't show up.

An empty chair at the witness table was placed ready for him together with a placard with his name on it next to those for representatives of three other companies working in Iraq - the London-based Aegis, and DynCorp and Triple Canopy, both Virginia-based companies.

USAID Ducks Legal Responsibility

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) also came in for extended criticism when David Blackshaw, the division chief for overseas security, told the commission that his agency was not legally responsible for the actions of armed guards that accompanied their grantees. "The role of the USAID's SEC's International Security Programmes Division is limited to advice and counsel," Blackshaw told the commissioners.

The commissioners were incensed. Several of them pulled out copies of a USAID Office of Inspector General report on private contracting that was issued last month that stated a third of USAID private security contracts in Afghanistan have no standard security requirements.

Commissioner Christopher Shays, a former Republican member of Congress from Connecticut, alleged that USAID was trying to "wash their hands" of any responsibility.

"God forbid something would happen with a violent accident in Afghanistan that would affect our national policy in Afghanistan and you would try that ridiculous line of argument," said Commissioner Robert Henke, a former Assistant Secretary for Management in the Department of Veterans Affairs, said. "It won't work."

"This commission was going to ask him, under oath, why his firm agreed in January to assume private security responsibilities at FOB Shield with several hundred guards that had not been properly vetted and approved," said Michael Thibault, one of the co-chairs of the commission and a former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency.

"This commission was also going to ask Mr. Torres why he personally flew to Iraq, to FOB Shield, and strongly suggested that Torres AES be allowed to post the unapproved guards, guards that would protect American troops, and then to 'catch-up the approval process'."

Instead, a lawyer informed the commission staff that Torres was "nervous about appearing".

The failure of a contractor to appear for an oversight hearing into lapses was just one example that the use of some 18,800 armed "private security contractors" in Iraq and another 23,700 in Afghanistan to protect convoys, diplomatic and other personnel, and military bases and other facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was not working.

Blackwater's New Afghan Contract

Perhaps the most famous private military contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq - North Carolina-based Blackwater - was not invited to sit at the witness table either, despite the fact that the company had been the subject of several investigations into misconduct.

For example, in September 2007, security guards from North Carolina-based Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

Blackwater staff have also been accused of killing other private security contractors - in December 2006, Andrew J. Moonen, was accused of killing a security guard of the Iraqi vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi. And as recently as May 2009, four Blackwater contractors were accused of killing an Afghan on the Jalalabad road in Kabul.

Members of the commission noted with astonishment that the State Department had awarded Blackwater a 120-million-dollar contract to guard U.S. consulates in Heart and Mazar-i- Sharif in Afghanistan this past Friday.

Asked to explain why Blackwater was awarded the contract, Charlene R. Lamb, deputy assistant secretary for international programmes at the State Department, stated that the competitors for the contract - DynCorp and Triple Canopy - weren't as qualified.

Yet Don Ryder of DynCorp and Ignacio Balderas of Triple Canopy testified that they were both qualified and able to do the contract. The two men said that they would consider lodging a formal protest at the State Department Tuesday after a de-briefing with the government.

The choice of Blackwater, which has been banned by the government of Iraq, left the commissioners with little doubt that the contract award system was flawed. "What does it take for poor contractual performance to result in contract termination or non-award of future contracts?" wondered Thibault.

Inherently Governmental

At a previous hearing of the commission last week, John Nagl, president of the Washington, DC-based Centre for a New American Security, submitted a report on the subject that explained why the government was turning to these companies: "Simple math illuminates a major reason for the rise of contractors: The U.S. military simply is not large enough to handle all of the missions assigned to it."

Yet it appears that the government does not even have the oversight capability to police the companies that it has hired to fill the gap.

Some witnesses and experts said that by definition this work should not be handed out to private contractors in war zone.

"Private security contractors are authorised to use deadly force to protect American lives in a war zone and to me if anything is inherently governmental, it's that," said Commissioner Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general at both the State Department and the Homeland Security Department. "We don't have a definitional problem, we have an acknowledgement of reality problem."

Non-governmental expert Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), said: "It has become clear to POGO that the answer is yes, PSCs are performing inherently governmental functions. A number of jobs that are not necessarily inherently governmental in general become so when they are conducted in a combat zone. Any operations that are critical to the success of the U.S. government's mission in a combat zone must be controlled by government personnel."


*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch - http://www.corpwatch.org.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/hearings-...chatterjee

[Ed Jewett]

"...The Washington Post reports on how the US Military's PSYOPS is awash with soft money that gets spent on contractors...."

Link to this post


###

"... we can take comfort that the logic of the printing press example must assert itself...." ['Helicopter Ben' Bernanke]

http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/...efault.htm

[Ed Jewett]

Military plans hummingbird-sized spies

Nano Aerial Vehicle will help soldiers fighting in crowded urban areas







http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38062588/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ed - your Washington Post link above deserves further attention.

It contains some pure Comedy Gold.

I particularly enjoyed the nonsense in the parts I've emboldened, including the fact that the PSYOPs specialists were so appallingly bad at communicating the truth that they couldn't even get press releases about their own budget right: it went from over $1billion to $600million to nothing.

They truly are self-obsessed, megalomaniac, wankers.

The Defense Department plans to spend nearly $1 billion on psychological operations (PSYOP) worldwide in fiscal 2011 -- and nearly 40 percent of it will go for contracted services and products.

The purpose of PSYOP is "to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior in a manner favorable to U.S. objectives," according to a report on Defense Department information operations sent to Congress in March.

How? By putting out truthful information through "television, web, posters, leaflets, billboards, radio, literature, drama and other creative means," according to the report. But who in the military is trained to do that?

For the Pentagon, contractors are the answer. Of about $180 million for PSYOP activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 95 percent will be for "large service provider contracts as well as small contracts for local service providers that perform printing and other production activities," according to the Defense Department, in answers to my questions.

Recent PSYOP activities in Afghanistan have included a major advertising campaign to persuade citizens to report suspected makeshift bombs to the military. It was done by contractors; as the March report notes, "DoD makes extensive use of contractors in media services to produce high-quality print, audio and video products."

The report adds, however, that contracted personnel "do not take the place of government and military decision makers who establish communication objectives, define target audiences, and approve all communication methodologies."

Still, there are "concerns about the [Defense] Department's ability to oversee adequately and manage appropriately the large sums of money flowing into a variety of information operations programs," the Senate Armed Services Committee said in its report on the fiscal 2011 Defense Authorization bill released this month. And the dismissal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal over his comments in a magazine has put a spotlight on one failed aspect of the military's dealings with the media.

One year ago, when Congress asked the Defense Department how much the military was spending on "strategic communications," it first answered about $1 billion, then $626 million. Less than a year later, in the March report, the agency told Congress that things had changed: There was no "strategic communications budget." Rather, that term applied to all Defense Department capabilities and programs "designed to affect perceptions and behavior [domestic and foreign] in a manner that supports U.S. objectives."

Although strategic communications as an activity has ended, the report notes that some combat commands "have established small SC [strategic communications] cells as part of the commander's special staff." It points out that these staff members "function as planners, integrators, and 'dot connectors.' " Here is where the lesson of the McChrystal affair comes in.

Duncan Boothby, who helped arrange Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings's entree with the McChrystal entourage, was an SC staff member. But he was a private subcontractor under a broader prime contract let by the Afghan command for strategic communications management services.

Contracting out these services, whether for strategic communications or PSYOP, is a problem. Remember the investigations into the activities of Michael Furlong, the Strategic Command employee who used money from an information operations program concerning makeshift bombs to contract for services to help identify Afghan insurgents?

Another problem area is when PSYOP activities, directed at foreign audiences, cross with public affairs, the military's traditional outlet for dealing with the news media and domestic and foreign audiences. Oversight of all Pentagon information activities has been under review, although PSYOP activities have drawn their own special team "to ensure that each constitutes a traditional military activity," according to the March report.

The military has expanded into areas where it lacks expertise but has the funds to pay for contractors. PSYOP has been a favorite of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), but with the program's new popularity, particularly in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, it has spread within the Army.

As one result, after approval by top Pentagon officials including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, SOCOM's commander, Adm. Eric T. Olson, announced last week that the PSYOP name will be dropped because of bad connotations and changed to Military Information Support Operations (MISO).

But name changes, whether dropping "strategic communications" or going from PSYOP to MISO, won't solve the underlying problems. As long as the Pentagon has funds for information activities -- in amounts that other agencies don't have and cannot get -- it will turn to contractors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...04830.html

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks, Jan.

Duly noted and added to our PsyOps file at E Pluribus Unum:
http://z7.invisionfree.com/E_Pluribus_Un...wforum=160

[Ed Jewett]

Former Top CIA Spy: How US Intelligence Became Big Business

Jeremy Scahill | July 7, 2010
Few who have seen the dramatic privatization of US intelligence operations from the inside ever speak about the role private contractors play in covert operations--certainly not in public. In late June, however, the CIA's former top counterterrorism official, Robert Grenier, participated in a rare public discussion on issues ranging from the incredible extent to which the US has relied on contractors to fill sensitive national security positions; to battlefield contractors in Afghanistan; to allegations of contractor involvement in "direct action" (lethal) operations, as well as commenting on Blackwater owner Erik Prince's reported involvement in a secret CIA assassination program. The former spy also criticized what he called attempts by the US military to "overstep their bounds" by conducting intelligence operations that traditionally have fallen under the purview of the CIA.
Grenier was undoubtedly one of the US intelligence community's heavy hitters in the aftermath of 9/11. He was CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan when the 9/11 attacks took place and coordinated the initial incursions by CIA personnel and contractors in the first year of the US invasion of Afghanistan. After a stint in what Grenier jokingly called "our excellent adventure in Iraq," where, as chief of the Iraq Issues Group, he planned covert US actions in the lead up to and ultimate invasion of the country, Grenier was named as director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), the unit coordinating the tip of the spear of the CIA's covert activities. In 2006, Grenier left the CIA, reportedly over disagreements with then-CIA director Porter Goss, including the issue of treatment of detainees and prisoners. After leaving the agency, Grenier worked at Kroll Inc., a security consulting firm, and is currently chairman of ERG Partners, a small consulting company.
Grenier and I participated in a frank discussion, along with Professor Katerie Carmola, author of Private Security Contractors and New Wars: Risk, Law, and Ethics, at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, where I had a chance to publicly ask Grenier some specific questions.
Grenier estimated that "many more than half" of the personnel who worked under him at the CIA's counterterrorism center were private contractors. Contractors "were coming in and they were all over the place," Grenier said of his time at CTC. "Often I would go down and talk to people in my work force and I would say, 'Hey, that was a great job and I saw what you did last night, I saw that cable that you turned up, thank you very much.' And I'd be startled when they would give me a business card."
It is difficult to access detailed information about the extent to which US intelligence activities are privatized, primarily because the budgets of the eighteen intelligence agencies operated by the United States are mostly classified. In 2007, journalist Tim Shorrock, who wrote the definitive book on the privatization of intelligence, Spies for Hire [1], obtained and published an unclassified document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that 70 percent of the US intelligence budget was spent on private contractors. No documents on these classified budgets have been made public since.
Grenier largely defended the use of contractors, primarily because he said he believes that the government, in a time of war, needs to be able to hire skilled, specialized personnel capable of securing the necessary security clearances. "It's far easier to go through the process to get a contractor if time is an issue than it would be to bring somebody on as a regular employee," Grenier said. He said that when he was running CIA operations in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, he was working with several of his predecessors who had left the CIA, but returned, with their experience and clearances, as independent contractors. Grenier cited another "very prosaic" reason for the reliance on contractors: the federal budgeting process.
Grenier called the system of allocating funds to US agencies the "most illogical process ever devised by the mind of man." He described Congressional funding restrictions that provided huge sums of money to the CIA post-9/11 to purchase goods and services, but not to hire new employees. Instead, he said, Congress provided one year supplemental funding packages to the CIA for "non-personal services." That funding, Grenier asserted, "you can spend for anything."
"You can buy armored vehicles, you can buy drones, or you can buy contractors. Contractors are not considered persons in the context of the federal budgeting process," Genier added. The CIA, therefore, got creative. "So, here was the Congress saying, 'What can we do for you, what can we give you?' Money was not the object—they'd give us anything we asked for and what we got was non-personal services dollars on a supplemental basis. And so, what did we have to do? We went out and bought contractors."
In the early stages of the US war in Afghanistan, Grenier said, many people were hired as individual independent contractors. Then, he says, small companies began popping up that specialized in providing the government and other entities with seasoned veterans of US special forces and intelligence agencies for hire. Within months, companies like Blackwater jumped head first into the rent-a-soldier industry. These companies offered what they called "turnkey solutions" in the war zone.
"Well, they figured out that they could extort—I should say that they could command—more money form the federal government if they somehow banded together," says Grenier, who described the rise of what he called "body shops" providing personnel. "It was like a form of unionization. They got together and they formed these little companies and they could engage in what we might call collective bargaining and thereby raise their salaries."
Shorrock, who analyzes government contracts for an AFL-CIO union, found Grenier's description interesting. "CIA and NSA employees are banned by statute from engaging in collective bargaining. But forming a company might be one way a group of operatives could get a better deal from the CIA on wages, health benefits or insurance," said Shorrock. "That shouldn't be confused with union rights, though."
While Grenier provided a utilitarian rationale for the CIA using contractors, he veered away from discussing the political expediency private forces offer the CIA by providing unattributable forces specializing in plausible deniability.
Several times during our discussion, I asked Grenier about the use of contractors in lethal "direct action" operations, some of which have been characterized as part of a secret CIA assassination program. I specifically asked him about the report [2] in January in Vanity Fair that Blackwater owner Erik Prince had trained a CIA team whose ultimate job would be to "find, fix and finish" suspected terrorists across the globe. Prince's men, according to the article, never "finished" a suspect, but they did do everything but pull the trigger in several countries, including in Germany. Prince claims to have paid for some operations "out of my own pocket.”
Many of the activities alleged to have been carried out by Prince and Blackwater occured while Grenier was director of CTC.
Grenier was visibly uncomfortable discussing the issue of Blackwater and "direct action," saying, "Although some of these things have been revealed and some of what has been revealed is perhaps true and some of it is perhaps untrue and some of it is perhaps exaggerated or misrepresented, but all of it is still classified and so it's difficult for me to speak to it directly to the extent that I know about it." He added: "There were things that frankly were new to me in what I read in that article."
Grenier rejected the notion that Blackwater would have been specifically hired by the CIA for assassination operations, offering a denial that carefully relied on the CIA's contracting process. "CIA would not be soliciting or putting out an RFP [a Request for Proposal] to solicit bids for a company, perhaps for the lowest bidder, to come out and perform services like [direct lethal action]."
While there is little chance that there is a US government contract with Blackwater floating around showing the CIA hired Blackwater to kill people, this type of contracting inherently creates gray areas that ultimately benefit the secrecy of the operations. There is no doubt that Blackwater forces have killed plenty of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and that not all of these "kills" have been defensive security operations.
Without confirming details of Blackwater's involvement in any lethal direct action operations, Grenier did say that to the extent that Prince and his men were potentially involved, they likely were not fully aware of the role they were playing in broader CIA operations. "By [Prince's] own admission those actions have never been carried out," Grenier said. "And certainly, if I had anything to do with it, they would not be carried out by private individuals." He then added: "A Navy SEAL in a buzz cut is probably not the individual that I would put on the street in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon to do surveillance on a potential target."
What Grenier did describe, in a careful and circumspect way, is a major reason why a company like Blackwater would be hired for involvement in such operations: the combination of experienced personnel and the networks of foreign nationals they cultivated over years of government intelligence work. At the time Grenier was running CTC, Blackwater was flush with well-connected CIA veterans who had vast networks of assets and contacts across the globe. In addition to Cofer Black, Prince counted among his most valued employees Enrique "Ric" Prado, a former CIA paramilitary officer who served as chief of operations for the CTC and Robert Richer, former deputy director of operations at the CIA. All of these men were deeply connected in a wide array of countries where the US was operating under the banner of "the war on terror."
"If, let us say, that one wanted to find individuals, probably foreign nationals who can go out and mount an effective surveillance against a particular target for whatever purpose—intelligence collection or whatever—then you are going to be looking for the right group of individuals who provide you with the right combination of skills that you are seeking," said Grenier. "I just wanted the right people with the right skills doing the job. Depending on the operation and what you want to get done, there really is no standard template. Every time is the first time."
According to Vanity Fair, while Grenier was at CTC, "[Erik] Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating 'hard target' countries—where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency’s designs."
Grenier described the value of access to such networks and connections held by some contractors: "It may well be that you're dealing with an individual and let's just say for the sake of discussion that he's a Blackwater employee and perhaps that individual knows some other individual—perhaps foreigners with whom he or she has dealt in the past--that you want to gain access to and bring in on the team. And maybe you want them to know what they're supposed to be doing and maybe you don't. Maybe you're going to have them only partially aware of what they're doing and not aware of what the ultimate purpose for it."
I pressed Grenier on why the CIA might use a company like Blackwater at any stage of a lethal operation instead of using US military special forces teams like those from the Joint Special Operations Command. Grenier pointed to the complicated logistics of preparing such operations. "It's not just a matter of sending in a direct action team, a JSOC squad to go and hit somebody. There's a tremendous amount of preparation, if you will, that has to be done beforehand--most of it having to do with intelligence collection."
As for Erik Prince's claims about his work with covert CIA teams, Grenier said, "The characterization that Erik Prince has provided—to the extent that he fully understood himself what he was saying—I think is easily subject to misinterpretation. I don't know what was in his mind when he spoke."
***
Overall, Grenier was generally supportive of the use of private contractors, though he did offer some criticisms. He expressed concerned about the "revolving door" between government and the private sector, saying he endorsed moves to ban CIA personnel from returning as contractors less than a year after leaving the agency before official retirement. "Many of these relationships are far too cozy, far too clubby and there are serious risks associated with the revolving door," he said.
He also said he believes that contractors who work with US intelligence agencies should not subsequently or concurrently working with foreign governments. "I can assure you that if the CIA were employing a contractor who had, thereby, access to very sensitive information, [the CIA] would take a very dim view of that same individual working for that company under a different contract, say, for the Israelis or for some other foreign government," said Grenier.
I asked Grenier about the US military classifying operations that might traditionally be considered intelligence operations, such as US special forces activities in countries like Yemen or Somalia, as "preparing the battlefield," making them a military rather than an intelligence operation. Some critics have suggested that such classification is an attempt to avoid Congressional oversight of certain covert operations. "That's a very interesting dodge," Grenier said. "It has not kept the Department of Defense from trying, at least in my view and the view of others in the intelligence community, to at least to some degree overstep their bounds." Grenier also said Congress "is complicit in it," saying, "One of the things that keeps the military from having to report its intelligence-related activities to the relevant intelligence committees is the very jealous armed services committees who don't want to have their military reporting to these other committees."
The Obama administration has continued the US policy of overwhelming reliance on private contractors at every level of the US national security apparatus and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the administration has dramatically increased the number of contractors from Bush-era levels. In Iraq, while the overall US presence is decreasing, the percentage of contractors within the total US force continues to rise. But it is not just on the battlefield. According to a recent Congressional investigation, some 69 percent of all Department of Defense personnel are private contractors. The CIA's recent $100 million contract with Blackwater for "security" services globally is a clear sign that this trend continues unabated at the agency under Leon Panetta.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting recently examined the issue of the use of contractors in sensitive operations at a hearing called, "Are Private Security Contractors Performing Inherently Governmental Functions?" One of the experts who testified, Dr. Allison Stanger, professor and director of the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College, said that the government use of contractors has become a necessity, rather than a choice, but she painted a sober picture of the implications of the United States using such forces. It "blurs the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, which is just what our enemies want. Al Qaeda's operatives have no country and are private actors waging war on the United States. Terrorists may receive funding from states, but they are by definition non-state actors," Stanger said. "If the United States can legitimately rely on non-state actors wielding weapons to protect our interests, why can't Al Qaeda or the Taliban, especially when contractor misdeeds appear to go completely unpunished?"

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/37143/form...g-business
Links:
[1] http://timshorrock.com/?page_id=198
[2] http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/featu...table=true