New DNI: Overseeing Aggression Abroad, Repression at Home

[Ed Jewett]

Sunday, June 6, 2010

New Director of National Intelligence: Overseeing Aggression Abroad, Repression at Home


Yesterday, President Barack Obama selected retired Air Force Lt. General James R. Clapper Jr. as his nominee as the secret state's new Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Obama heaped copious praise on the general in a Rose Garden appearance Saturday. "Jim is one of our nation's most experienced and most respected intelligence professionals," Obama said. "He possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear," according to a White House transcript of the president's remarks.

Clapper, who faces a tough confirmation fight in the Senate, would direct the 16-agency U.S. "Intelligence Community." From his perch in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Clapper would coordinate America's formidable spy apparatus as it wages a global shadow war to control other people's resources and secure geostrategic advantage over their imperialist rivals.

The position of DNI was created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the Director has neither operational control nor budgetary authority over any of the agencies he oversees as the nation's top spymaster. Bureaucratic in-fighting and turf battles within the security apparat, particularly with the CIA under Leon Panetta, but also with insiders such as White House counterterrorism adviser, the former CIA torture-enabler, John Brennan, have fueled internecine feuds amongst the various players.

If confirmed by the Senate, Clapper would replace retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair, who was pressured to resign by the Obama regime May 28, over so-called "intelligence failures," resulting from the aborted Christmas Day attempted bombing aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit and the failed May 1 Times Square car bombing.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in a series of articles earlier this year, far from being a failure to "connect the dots," as with the 9/11 provocation itself, the American secret state possessed sufficient information that should have prevented alleged bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), an ODNI fiefdom, was cited for "lapses" and faulted for its failure to collate information in their possession. But as I reported, during January 20 testimony to the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, NCTC head honcho Michael E. Leiter told the panel: "I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy, testified before the House Homeland Security Committee January 27, that the State Department did not revoke the would-be bomber's passport at the specific request of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Kennedy claimed that "revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing." The Undersecretary said that allowing the alleged terrorist to keep his visa would have "helped" federal investigators take down the entire network "rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort."

While the would-be suicide fanbois kept his passport, one "reform" that the "change" administration implemented was a directive by President Obama authorizing the assassination of American citizens accused of terrorism. Death sentences would be carried out without any legal recourse whatsoever, simply on the basis of unsubstantiated Executive Branch allegations.

Clapper, 69, is a close ally of current Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former CIA Director under Poppy Bush and an architect of the Iran-Contra coverup. Currently the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Clapper replaced Stephen A. Cambone in 2007, a crony of former Secretary of Defense, the unindicted war criminal Donald Rumsfeld.

Like many retired military officials who leverage national "service" as entrée to the lucrative world of outsourced corporate spying, Clapper was the Chief Operating Officer for Detica DFI, a British intelligence and security firm that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the scandal-tainted BAE Systems.

According to a blurb on the firm's web site, "Detica specialises in collecting, managing and exploiting information to reveal actionable intelligence." Doubtless, Clapper found himself right at home.

Last October, the British high-tech news magazine The Register, revealed that Detica and Lockheed Martin had secured a multi-billion pound contract with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.'s National Security Agency for work on a domestic snooping project called "Mastering the Internet." That top secret program is currently developing systems and methods for extracting intelligence from huge volumes of surveillance data generated by online services.

Similar programs are currently underway here in the heimat, many of which are linked to the secretive Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). Last month's stand-up of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) found top Pentagon officials and the defense contractors whom they so loyally serve, floating the idea "that the Defense Department might start a protective program for civilian networks, based on a deeply controversial effort to keep hackers out of the government's pipes," Wired reported.

"A 356-page classified plan" journalist Noah Shachtman disclosed, "outlining CYBERCOM's rise is being put into action." According to Wired, "procedures are now being worked out for CYBERCOM to help the Department of Homeland Security defend government and civilian networks."

Wired reported last week that "Joe Lieberman wants to give the federal government the power to take over civilian networks' security, if there’s an 'imminent cyber threat.' It's part of a draft bill, co-sponsored by Senators Lieberman and Susan Collins, that provides the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to ensure that 'critical infrastructure' stays up and running in the face of a looming hack attack."

Two of the agencies that would fall under Clapper's brief are DHS and NSA, both of which are charged with "protecting" critical network infrastructure in the unlikely event of a massive cyber attack.

Prior to his current position as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, between 2001-2006 Clapper was the Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a DOD combat support agency charged with developing "imagery and map-based intelligence solutions for U.S. national defense, homeland security and safety of navigation."

Accordingly, NGA "provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives" gathered by America's super-secret fleet of spy satellites flown by its "sister" organization, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as well as imagery and geospatial information derived from drones or other air based U.S. assets.

One can be fairly certain that NGA's "map-based intelligence solutions" for homeland security have been deployed for domestic repression. As Antifascist Calling reported in 2008, according to a planning document released by the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks, in the run-up to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, NGA was in the thick of things as a gaggle of federal and state law enforcement agencies targeted activists and journalists for preemptive arrest.

Before leading NGA, Clapper was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the principal producer and manager of military intelligence for the Pentagon. Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book, Spies For Hire, that with an annual estimated budget of $1 billion, DIA employs some 11,000 military and civilian personnel, "35 percent of whom are contractors."

According to Shorrock's analysis for CorpWatch, principal security corps doing yeoman's work for DIA include BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, Inc. CACI International, Inc. and L-3 Communications Inc.

In reporting Clapper's selection as DNI, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have emphasized the general's "decades of experience" in getting America's sprawling secret state under Executive Branch control.

According to the Times, Clapper's announcement amounts "to pushing the reset button for the president," as Obama tries to "recalibrate" an intelligence and security apparatus that has "undergone continued revamping since the debacle leading up to the Iraq war," one that "still lacks the cohesion necessary in an evolving war with terrorists."

The Journal, on the other hand, has stressed that despite "resistance" by Democratic and Republican party grifters on Capitol Hill, Clapper "has significant backing among intelligence professionals, who also note that he is the most experienced individual willing to take the job."

The Journal reports that one of Clapper's "earliest moves was to shut a Pentagon database, called TALON, that was supposed to track terrorist threats to military bases but was found to also contain information on antiwar protesters."

TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) was a spying database that was under the operational control of the U.S. Air Force. It was authorized by neocon warmonger and serial intelligence fabricator, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in 2002. By 2004 however, TALON became the "property" of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a secretive and heavily-outsourced Pentagon satrapy run by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone.

Following media revelations of the program, in 2007 The National Security Archive published a series of documents outlining CIFA's illegal domestic operations; surveillance that continues today under new Pentagon programs authorized by Obama's discredited "change" regime, as revealed last summer by Democracy Now!.

While the Journal is technically correct that the TALON database was removed from CIFA's control by Clapper, the TALON system itself was offloaded, as I previously reported back in 2008, to the FBI and now reside in a Bureau database known as Guardian and e-Guardian.

Even though CIFA has since been supplanted by the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), SourceWatch revealed that "in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements," DOD "will maintain a record copy of the collected data," including data illegally collected on antiwar activists, continues to exist somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon for future reference.

Whether or not Clapper is confirmed by the Senate, illegal wars of aggression will continue; drones will still rain death and destruction upon unarmed civilians; America's pit bull in the Middle East, Israel, will carry out international acts of piracy and murder on the high seas with impunity as Gaza starves; and the Executive Branch will complete the destruction of the Constitution and the rule of law at home to "keep us safe."
Posted by Antifascist at 11:14 AM

[Ed Jewett]

Director of National Insanity

Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2010-06-06 22:43

• Obama Administration
  

From MichaelMoore.com

"Jim is one of our nation's most experienced and most respected intelligence professionals. He possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what
we want to hear.'' – Barack Obama, announcing nomination of James Clapper to be Director of National Intelligence

FLASHBACK:
Meet Man Who'll Run All U.S. Intelligence
"The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria ... 'unquestionably ... I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy
and disperse,' General Clapper said ..." – N.Y. Times, October 29, 2003

Karl's Favorite Expert
"Another possibility is that some weapons may have been dispersed to other countries, such as Syria, before the war. That was the assessment of General James R. Clapper, Jr. ..." – Karl Rove,
Courage and Consequences, p. 339

[Austin Kelley]

http://www.fpif.org/articles/clapper_man...enterprise

Clapper: Managing the Intelligence Enterprise

By Tim Shorrock, June 18, 2010



In the two weeks since President Obama appointed Retired Air Force Lt. General James R. Clapper, to be director of national intelligence (DNI), there’s been a slew of speculation about his long record in U.S. intelligence and how it might affect his chances for confirmation.

Most of it has focused on the bipartisan opposition to Clapper in Congress. Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Kit Bond (R-MO), the co-chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, along with a few lawmakers in the House, have criticized Clapper for being too close to the Pentagon and without the gravitas to carry out the tough job of running the vast 16-member Intelligence Community. “He has not been in favor of a strong DNI,” declared Feinstein, citing a memo Clapper’s staff drafted for her committee earlier this year. The White House disputes the characterization.

Clapper, who is currently undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, has also been attacked for being too close to the Bush administration during the two years he served as director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Shortly after Clapper’s nomination as DNI, the Washington Times’ Eli Lake unearthed a 2003 interview in which Clapper argued — to the later delight of Karl Rove — that Saddam Hussein had indeed smuggled WMD materials out of Iraq. His conclusions drew whoops of derision from some liberals, who jumped on the interview as evidence of Clapper’s alleged fealty to the Bush-Cheney war strategy (“A batshit insane statement,” said the ever-acerbic Firedoglake).

None of these portrayals, however, gets to the two most important aspects of Clapper’s career: his ties to the $50 billion intelligence contracting industry, and his role in both developing and deepening the secret intelligence wars initiated by George W. Bush and intensified by the Obama administration.

Privatization of Intelligence

As I first reported in my 2007 book Spies for Hire, 70 percent of the intelligence budget flows to the private sector. Most of that money goes to around 200 contractors that supply personnel, security, and technology to U.S. spying agencies (the office of the DNI confirmed the 70 percent figure in 2008). When Clapper speaks, euphemistically perhaps, of the intelligence “enterprise” — “We have the largest, most capable intelligence enterprise on the planet, and it is the solemn, sacred trust of the DNI to make that enterprise work,” he said in when he accepted Obama’s nomination this month — he is talking about the total intelligence force — that is, the armies of contractors that staff the agencies, and the government officials and “intelligence professionals” who manage them.

Thus, Clapper doesn’t lean toward either the Bush or Obama foreign policy agendas, nor does he fit into neat categories of left or right. Instead, he represents a continuation of the heavily contracted, military-driven intelligence policies of the last six years. And he is totally in synch with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who represents the continuity between the national security agendas of George Bush and Barack Obama.

Indeed, Clapper and Gates may be this administration’s strongest proponents of the way intelligence is used in today’s wars: secret operations that combine all aspects of spying — human, signals, and geospatial — with close cooperation from the CIA and the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command. The recent story in The Washington Post that “secret” operations are expanding worldwide confirms how deeply embedded this counterinsurgency strategy is in the Obama administration. The ongoing Predator war in Pakistan — carried out by CIA drones and fed target information by U.S. intelligence operatives — is the latest example of this new style of warfare, which even the United Nations is beginning to question because of the extreme secrecy of the program.

Clapper has been deeply involved in the synergies between agencies and contractors that make such counterinsurgency campaigns possible, and has worked for and advised many of the companies that profit from Obama’s intelligence wars. Moreover, as someone with close ties to industry, Clapper is comfortable with contractors at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, including the extremely controversial area of interrogations.

In a 2007 incident that I recount in my book, Clapper was asked by a Senate committee (which had the scandal of Abu Ghraib on its mind), to explain in writing the “proper role” of contractors in interrogation. “I believe it is permissible for contractors to participate in detainee interrogation, as long as they comply with the policies and guidance which govern DOD military and civilian interrogators,” he replied. Surprisingly, Mike McConnell, who was Bush’s DNI and a contractor himself, answered quite differently, telling the same committee: “I can’t imagine using contractors for anything like that.”

Clapper, of course, is far from alone: Almost every senior intelligence official over the past five years has had strong ties to contractors. McConnell, who directed the National Security Agency during the Clinton administration, came to the office of the DNI straight from Booz Allen Hamilton, where he was in charge of the company’s extensive contracts in military intelligence; he’s back there now, doing the same job. And John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and his chief spokesperson on intelligence matters, left the CIA in 2005 to join The Analysis Corporation, a major contractor that built the terrorist database and no-fly list used by the government to monitor foreigners entering the country.

Inside the Enterprise

To better understand what Clapper might mean by the term “intelligence enterprise,” it’s important to look at how agencies and companies have worked together. Take the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which Clapper took over two days after 9/11 and ran for the next five years. It is a key player in the intelligence wars, providing overhead imagery and mapping tools that allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the skies and space and find exact locations of targets.

What gives the NGA its power to pinpoint locations of people is its close working relationships with the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors communications of all kinds. As the NGA itself once explained, these collaborative relationships allow "horizontal integration" between the two agencies, defined as "working together from start to finish, using NGA's 'eyes'
and NSA 'ears.'" As I reported in Salon:

This makes it possible for spying agencies to create hybrid intelligence tools that enhance the ability of U.S. forces in combat. By combining intercepts of cellphone calls with overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), for example, intelligence analysts can track suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan in real time. The full capabilities of such tracking became clear in 2007, when then-NGA Director Robert B. Murrett disclosed that NSA-NGA tracking allowed the U.S. military to locate and bomb the safe house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was staying in June 2006. "Eventually, it all comes down to physical location," he told a press gathering that I attended. When NSA and NGA data are combined, he added, "the multiplier effect is dramatic."

Most of the data collected by the NGA and NSA is analyzed by the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which builds and maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground stations to process NSA signals and NGA imagery. At these stations, intelligence officials say, the "magic on the ground" — that combination of imagery and intercepts that can track events and people in real time — is taking place. In 2006, then-NRO Director Donald Kerr described the collaboration. At one “unknown ground station,” he said at a conference I attended, "we are integrating data that comes from our entire U.S. SIGINT system, from imaging capabilities and other space assets, and doing it to a cell at that ground station, which is empowered to other tasking as well. We're doing real-time collection, fusion and tasking modifications to get a better intelligence effect."

The NGA, NSA, and NRO together eat up about $20 billion of the nation’s annual $60 billion intelligence budget and employ huge numbers of contractors. Of the NGA’s 14,000 workers, for example, more than 7,000 are full-time contractors. About one-third of the NSA’s 35,000-person workforce is made up of contractors. And at the NRO, the figures are astonishing: “Ninety-five percent of the resources over which we have stewardship in fact go out on a contract to our industrial base, and it’s an important thing to recognize that we cannot function without this highly integrated industrial government team,” Kerr once told reporters. Put these agencies together, and contractors make up the vast majority of the workforce that supplies the most precious — and expensive — intelligence controlled by the national security state.

Several contractors, including SAIC and CACI International, claimed partial responsibility for the takedown of the Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Since then, of course, the intelligence-driven style of warfare, particularly in Pakistan, has intensified under the overall management of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command. Other contractors involved in the “enterprise” include Blackwater/Xe, L-3 Communications, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Booz Allen Hamilton (to track these and other companies, see the database I’ve developed on the intelligence industry with CorpWatch).

Clapper’s Ties to Industry

As NGA director, Clapper worked closely with the NGA’s technology and personnel suppliers, which are dominated by Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, and the satellite vendor GeoEye, the world’s largest commercial satellite operator.

Then, almost immediately after leaving the agency, Clapper joined the GeoEye board of directors — a major coup for the company. “It’s like hiring Colonel Sanders if you’re selling fried chicken,” Mark E. Brender, GeoEye’s vice president for corporate communications and marketing, told me at the time. “We think he will provide very thoughtful strategic advice on where government money may be headed.” According to an AP biography, Clapper also served as a director for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the NGA’s largest contractors, and SRA International, a company that provides IT and counter-terrorism expertise to the NGA and other Pentagon intelligence agencies.

In my research for Spies for Hire, I also found that Clapper worked for DFI Government Services, a British-owned company making headway in the U.S. intelligence market, and an obscure company called 3001 International Inc., which describes itself as “a prime National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) contractor” that “has served Department of Defense clients with mapping and imagery analysis solutions for decades.” (It’s now owned by Northrop Grumman).

Like McConnell and Brennan, Clapper is also tightly linked to the largest business associations in the intelligence industry. He has been a frequent speaker at events sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, which was founded by the NGA’s leading contractors and sponsors the largest annual gathering of intelligence contractors in the country. In 2007, the USGIF awarded Clapper a lifetime achievement award; in 2008, Clapper delivered a keynote speechand gave a detailed interview to the foundation’s newsletter.

And, shortly after leaving the helm of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1999, Clapper served a two-year term as president of the Security Affairs Support Association, the largest organization of contractors for the NSA and the CIA. In 2005, it was renamed the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), and remains one of the least-known but most powerful organizations in U.S. intelligence. The centrality of INSA to the intelligence “enterprise” can be seen in its last two chairmen: the Bush administration’s Mike McConnell and Obama’s John Brennan.

The Gates-Clapper Partnership

Next to Obama, Clapper’s most enthusiastic supporter is Gates. He underscored his ties to Clapper on June 6, when he praised the nominee to traveling Pentagon reporters as someone with “not only long experience and familiarity with the intelligence world but the temperament to have the kind of constructive, positive chemistry with other leaders” of the IC. Once he’s confirmed, Clapper is likely to continue Gates’ policies to carefully reduce the Pentagon’s centralized control over intelligence while deepening its role in operations.

As pointed out by The Atlantic’s national security reporter Marc Ambinder, Clapper has a reputation as an independent actor who, as NGA director, actually sought to bring more civilian control over intelligence assets. In a famous incident in 2004, for instance, Clapper earned the wrath of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by telling a Senate committee that the NGA’s work would be unaffected if the agency was removed from Pentagon control and placed under the DNI.

Gates, too, has been a proponent of a strong DNI. Even before he was sworn in he told a Senate confirmation hearing of his “deep unhappiness” about the “dominance of the Defense Department in the intelligence arena.” And once in office, he immediately set about to reduce the Pentagon’s footprint in spying. His first act as secretary of defense was to hire Clapper to replace the controversial Stephen Cambone, who had been Donald Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for intelligence. Clapper then moved quickly to dismantle some of Rumsfeld’s and Cambone’s prized programs.

Early on, he ordered a review of the Counter Intelligence Field Activity office, which Rumsfeld started in 2002 to monitor security around U.S. military bases in North America and quickly turned into a domestic surveillance organ. He also put an end to the Counterinsurgency Field Activity’s massive “Talon” database, which over a period of six years had compiled dossiers on thousands of U.S. citizens, including many hundreds of people merely exercising their rights to dissent. And in a move that brought the DNI right into the Pentagon, Gates signed an agreement with DNI McConnell designating Clapper as the office’s chief adviser on military intelligence. Slowly, bureaucratic power began to shift away from the Pentagon and back to the DNI.

Gates and Clapper showed their cards again in May 2007, when they “accepted” the retirement of Lt. General William Boykin. He was the Special Forces veteran who had described the “war on terror” as a holy crusade against the Moslem Satan; he had also overseen the Pentagon’s counterterrrorism operations as Cambone’s top military aide. Gates replaced him with Major General Richard Zahner, the NSA’s director of signals intelligence. This too sent a strong message: Boykin had been one of the biggest proponents of sending Pentagon intelligence collectors abroad to gather information for future military operations without informing the CIA, a practice that Gates and Clapper quietly ended in 2007.

As Gates and McConnell began to mend relations between their two organizations, and the corrosive rivalry between the Pentagon and the CIA began to subside in the last year of the Bush administration and the first year of Obama. U.S. intelligence policies, and relations between key national security agencies, began to return to the “normalcy” of earlier, pre-Rumsfeld years, with the civilians in charge of the intelligence enterprise.

The new arrangement greatly pleased the CIA. In 2007, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden praised Clapper for integrating CIA human intelligence with humint provided by the military services and the DIA. In a little-noticed speech to the National Guard Association, Hayden said this:

Jim (Clapper) is on the same wavelength of really strengthening Defense HUMINT and putting it on a solid footing and, frankly, the way things work, the more the guy in my chair, not as a director of CIA, but as the national HUMINT manager, puts his arm around Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force HUMINT, the more that arm actually looks like a protective wing around this discipline and this function inside the military departments.

No wonder that CIA Director Leon Panetta, in endorsing the retired Air Force general for DNI, declared that “few people have more intelligence experience” than Clapper.

As they tilted the balance away from the Pentagon and back to the DNI and the White House, Gates and Clapper intensified their pursuit of important intelligence programs in IT and communications. These programs, involving information-sharing and integration of operations across agency lines, also happened to be areas where outsourcing has been most extensive.

But managing a privatized enterprise is second nature to both men. Clapper’s record is clear; less known is Gates’ history (After he left the CIA in the early 1990s, Gates he served as a director for SAIC, one of the largest contractors to the IC, as well as the intelligence contractor TRW, which is now part of Northrop Grumman.) As they work to create a new intelligence policy for Obama, these two men are watching over a huge market for intelligence contractors, with a total value of at least $50 billion. It will be intriguing to see if Clapper is asked about any of this in his confirmation hearings later this month — and how his ties to the Intelligence-Industrial Complex, which he likes to call the enterprise — will affect his decisions.


Tim Shorrock is a longtime contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus. He has written extensively about intelligence for Salon and The Nation. His book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, was published by Simon and Schuster.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Change you can believe in?

Nah - the same old shit served up by the military-multinational-intelligence-complex and its new puppet leader, the oh-so-smooth Obama.

Clapper, 69, is a close ally of current Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former CIA Director under Poppy Bush and an architect of the Iran-Contra coverup. Currently the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Clapper replaced Stephen A. Cambone in 2007, a crony of former Secretary of Defense, the unindicted war criminal Donald Rumsfeld.

Like many retired military officials who leverage national "service" as entrée to the lucrative world of outsourced corporate spying, Clapper was the Chief Operating Officer for Detica DFI, a British intelligence and security firm that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the scandal-tainted BAE Systems.

According to a blurb on the firm's web site, "Detica specialises in collecting, managing and exploiting information to reveal actionable intelligence." Doubtless, Clapper found himself right at home.

Last October, the British high-tech news magazine The Register, revealed that Detica and Lockheed Martin had secured a multi-billion pound contract with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.'s National Security Agency for work on a domestic snooping project called "Mastering the Internet." That top secret program is currently developing systems and methods for extracting intelligence from huge volumes of surveillance data generated by online services.

Clapper has no problem with sub-contracting torture.... sorry, interrogation...

Clapper has been deeply involved in the synergies between agencies and contractors that make such counterinsurgency campaigns possible, and has worked for and advised many of the companies that profit from Obama’s intelligence wars. Moreover, as someone with close ties to industry, Clapper is comfortable with contractors at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, including the extremely controversial area of interrogations.

In a 2007 incident that I recount in my book, Clapper was asked by a Senate committee (which had the scandal of Abu Ghraib on its mind), to explain in writing the “proper role” of contractors in interrogation. “I believe it is permissible for contractors to participate in detainee interrogation, as long as they comply with the policies and guidance which govern DOD military and civilian interrogators,” he replied. Surprisingly, Mike McConnell, who was Bush’s DNI and a contractor himself, answered quite differently, telling the same committee: “I can’t imagine using contractors for anything like that.”

[Ed Jewett]

See Shorrock's "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing".

How to take over from the inside :

Spies For Hire Part 1-3 of 3(2008)

Democracy Now Interviews Shorrock

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yGfI8QCLAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWWL_TWaF...re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efprcn0yZ...re=related



Spies for Hire: New Online Database of U.S. Intelligence Contractors
by Tim Shorrock, Special to CorpWatch
November 16th, 2009
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15468



CorpWatch Releases Online Database of U.S. Intelligence Contractors

Joint project with SPIES FOR HIRE author Tim Shorrock
Now available at SPIES FOR HIRE.org

Contacts:
• Tim Shorrock: E-mail: timshorrock [at] gmail [dot] com
Tel: +1-901/361-7441

• CorpWatch: Tonya Hennessey: E-mail: tonya [at] corpwatch [dot] org
Tel: +1-650/273-2475


###### ####

Private Spies: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing

by Tom Burghardt

Global Research, August 2, 2008
Antifascist Calling...

CACI Grabs Scottish Census Contract, Ignites Political Firestorm Over Torture Allegations

Glasgow's Sunday Herald reported July 27 that a British subsidiary of CACI International was awarded an £18.5 million ($36.6) contract by the Scottish government to carry out the country's next census. The announcement ignited a political firestorm.
Leading human rights and antiwar organizations have condemned the deal and threatened the Scottish National Party (SNP) government with a mass boycott should the agreement stand.
On June 30, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other law firms filed a series of civil lawsuits against CACI International, Inc., CACI Premier Technology and L-3 Services Inc., a division of L-3 Communications over allegations of torture at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. AFC has previously reported on these landmark cases, see: "Abu Ghraib Torture Claims Spook CACI, L-3 Communications."
Sunday Herald investigations editor Neil Mackay writes,

Granting CACI (UK) -- a subsidiary of the firm accused of torture -- the £18.5 million contract has not only badly wounded the SNP government's claims of being more ethical than Labour and putting human rights at the top of its agenda, but has also led to fears personal data on millions of Scots collected by the company might be sifted by the US government given the close relationship between the Bush administration and the CACI head office in Arlington, Virginia. ("Scottish Government Hires Firm Accused of Torture in Iraq," Sunday Herald, 27 July 2008)

As strategic partners in Washington's "global war on terror," private corporations, particularly those in the defense and burgeoning "homeland security" industries, have been incorporated into the state's intelligence apparatus--with little or no accountability and even less oversight.
Human rights' lawyer John Scott told Mackay, "The government is opening itself up to significant and justified protest. Ordinary members of the public could refuse to have anything to do with the census. A boycott is something to be considered. It would be a legitimate step. We cannot ignore our principles."
As outrage grows over the deal, The Stop the War Coalition, a UK-wide organization that has mobilized mass opposition to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, launched a petition drive against the contract. The SWC petition states "awarding millions of taxpayers' money to a subsidiary of a firm that has benefited from a contract at Abu Ghraib, profiting from an illegal and immoral occupation, is contrary to the views of the majority of the Scottish public."
Aamer Anwar, a prominent human rights attorney with the organization Scotland Against Criminalising Communities told the Sunday Herald, "the US government doesn't give a damn about people's rights, it'll gather data in any way possible how can we be sure that the census information will not be handed over to the US government in the interests of homeland security?"
Private Spies: A Cautionary Tale
Anwar's concerns are indeed justified. In May, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on the case of Col. Larry Richards, a Marine reservist stationed at Camp Pendleton. According to investigative journalist Rick Rogers, Richards, a group of fellow Marines and law enforcement officers, including the cofounder of the Los Angeles County Terrorist Early Warning Center (LACTEW), stole secret files from the Strategic Technical Operations Center.
While Col. Richards and the other conspirators described below had no relationship to CACI or its web of worldwide affiliates their case however, is illustrative of the inherent dangers of employing private corporations with ties to the military-industrial-surveillance complex to perform sensitive public functions.
Created in 1996, the LACTEW has been described by the FBI and the Office of National Intelligence as "a model for others to emulate," according to the ACLU. The LACTEW has since "evolved" into the the Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC) in Los Angeles. When not on active duty, Richards worked as a "top specialist" at LACTEW, according to the Union-Tribune.
But when he was working at Camp Pendleton, Richards' private spy ring stole hundreds of classified files, including those marked "Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information," the highest U.S. Government classification. The files included surveillance dossiers on the Muslim community and antiwar activists in Southern California.
Members of the ring included a Marine Gunnery Sgt., Gary Maziarz, who was given access to Richards' "logon and password to access confidential computer accounts on the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System and Secret Internet Protocol Router Network," while Richards was deployed to Iraq, the Union-Tribune reported.
Another conspirator was Lauren Martin, an intelligence analyst at U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. NORTHCOM manages information about potential terrorism operations nationwide, and "Martin was responsible for the region that included Southern California, Maziarz testified" during his court martial.
While the private spies claimed they were acting on "patriotic motives" and were seeking to "minimize the threat of a terrorist attack," Richards and the others, Rogers reported, "shared anti-terrorism intelligence with defense contractors in exchange for future employment."
Among the firms being "scrutinized" for possible links to the ultranationalist spy ring are Kroll Associates, described as "a risk-management firm," and MPRI International Group, a "private military contractor" owned by L-3 Communications, a codefendant in the CCR lawsuit. According to Richards' account to investigators, MPRI allegedly offered him "$300,000 to work in Afghanistan," the Union-Tribune reported.
Rogers reported that Kroll's clients included the city of San Diego and that some of its employees have had ties to the Los Angeles County Terrorist Early Warning Center. MPRI denied that Richards ever worked for the firm. Kroll refused to comment on the allegations to the Union-Tribune.
As the American Civil Liberties Union documents in their update on the groups' November 2007 report on Fusion Centers, which LACTEW served as a "model,"

In the six months since our report, new press accounts have borne out many of our warnings. In just that short time, news accounts have reported overzealous intelligence gathering, the expansion of uncontrolled access to data on innocent people, hostility to open government laws, abusive entanglements between security agencies and the private sector, and lax protections for personally identifiable information. (Mike German and Jay Stanley, "Fusion Center Update," ACLU, July 29, 2008)

While there was no CACI involvement in the scandal, the question must still be asked: will the "abusive entanglements between security agencies and the private sector" be replicated in Scotland?
Considering the breathtaking reach of the Official Secrets Act and the shocking abuses perpetrated by British intelligence agencies against their own citizens, many of which have been documented by the Pat Finucane Centre for Human Rights and Social Change, this is not an issue that should be taken lightly.
Will Data Be More Secure in Scotland?
Given serious and well-documented data-security breaches in the United States and elsewhere, egregious civil liberties violations, as well as the seamless relationships that exist among the military, law enforcement and private security contractors with a vested interest in hyping the "terrorist threat," the concerns of Scottish human rights' campaigners are hardly misplaced.
The Scottish government for its part, have denied the charges and defended its actions by claiming CACI (UK) was not involved in defense work and was a "separate legal entity from its US parent company. Allegations of improper conduct made against the parent company have been vehemently denied, but in any event there is no link between these allegations and the work of CACI (UK)," the Sunday Herald reported.
Claiming the government "would never be a party" with any company "convicted" of human rights abuses, SNP spokespeople asserted that their choice of the firm was based solely on claims that CACI's offer represented "the best and most competitively priced of the bids we received, delivering best value for tax-payers' money."
The government contended it "could not take unproven allegations into consideration". The SNP government also claimed that personal information would be protected through "independent audits of security," according to Mackay's report.
CACI (UK) maintained that allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib "was not substantiated by any evidence or proof, and subsequent investigations by both CACI and the US government could not confirm it. No CACI employee was ever depicted in the shocking and disturbing photos seen in the press."
Despite CACI assertions to the contrary, photographic evidence indeed exits and was published more than two years earlier. In April 2006, Salon investigative journalist Mark Benjamin published a photograph of CACI International interrogator Daniel Johnson, a defendant in CCR's lawsuit against the company, interrogating an Iraqi prisoner in what Army investigators described as "an unauthorized stress position." According to Benjamin,

The Army investigated the circumstances behind the photograph, found "probable cause" that a crime had been committed, and referred the case to the Justice Department for prosecution. (Salon obtained the photo from someone who spent time at Abu Ghraib as a uniformed member of the military and is familiar with the Army investigation there.) But in early 2005, a Department of Justice attorney told the Army that the evidence in the case did not justify prosecution. ("No Justice for All," Salon, April 14, 2006)

Indeed, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) told Salon their office had "investigated the circumstances" surrounding the incident and found "probable cause to believe a crime was committed by civilian contractors." However, after the case was referred to the Department of Justice, "an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia told the Army that he had reviewed the Johnson case and found there was 'insufficient evidence' to prosecute."
There the case against Johnson and other contractors languished until this May when CCR initiated a lawsuit in Los Angeles federal district court, brought by a former "ghost" detainee at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and torture center. That case was filed against another former CACI contract employee, Steven Stefanowicz, aka "Big Steve."
As I reported in July, CCR attorneys were forced to file separate civil suits only after a federal District of Columbia judge in 2004 refused the attorney's petition to consolidate some 237 victims' abuse claims as a class-action lawsuit. The judge ruled he "lacked jurisdiction," not that the charges were "baseless allegations," as CACI maintains. The original complaint is still pending. Why then, was CACI less than forthcoming?
How Is this Relevant to the Issue of the Scottish Census?
As the ACLU forcefully argues, "the elements of [a] nascent domestic surveillance system include: Watching and recording the everyday activities of an ever-growing list of individuals; channeling the flow of the resulting reports into a centralized security agency; sifting through ('data mining') these reports and databases with computers to identify individuals for closer scrutiny." (ACLU, op. cit.)
A centralized database of census information culled by a private corporation with long-standing ties to the military-industrial-surveillance complex sets up a system ripe with the potential for abuse, particularly if such data were to fall--or drop--into the wrong hands, as feared by human rights, antiwar and civil liberties advocates.
CACI is not some eager start-up; rather the firm has been described as "one of the Pentagon's favorite contractors" by Tim Shorrock in his essential book, Spies For Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.
And according to Washington Technology's "Top 100 Federal Prime Contractors: 2008," CACI International, Inc. clocked-in at No. 17 with some $1,337,472,153 in total revenue. Some $1,105,765,855 or 82.6% was a result of defense-related contracts for IT and network services, data information, management services and what the publication terms "integrated security and intelligence solutions."
Meanwhile, the victims of heinous abuse and torture that resulted from policies crafted at the highest levels of the Bush administration, and with the alleged complicity of many of their "outsourced" partners, are still awaiting their day in court and a modicum of justice.
For more information on CCR's lawsuits see: "New Abu Ghraib Torture Claims Filed Against Military Contractors," Press Release, May 5, 2008 and "CCR Files Four New Abu Ghraib Lawsuits Targeting Military Contractors in U.S. Courts," Press Release, June 30, 2008.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.