R. J. Hillhouse is spotlighting a troublesome issue: America's outsourcing of intelligence work. She'll give radio interviews today at 10 am (EST) on Washington Post Radio (via Internet) and at 10 pm on the Jim Bohanon show. In the July 8 Washington Post, Hillhouse wrote:
"In April, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed -- and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show."
Hillhouse said contractors do good work but fears that "corporate grown agents will be inculcated with corporate values and ethics, not those of public service" (WaPo). Given what scandals like WorldCom and Enron taught us, I'm nervous. The numerous reports on government contractor waste, fraud and abuse only compound my nervousness.
In The Nation (July 31), Hillhouse mentioned three red-flag-raising contractors (Truthout): Lockheed Martin, which settled a Justice Department suit for $38 million after allegedly dishonest contract negotiations; Raytheon, which settled two government suits for $7.7 million over alleged inflation of contract prices; and, Booz allen Hamilton, which made headlines in June, because a $2 million Homeland Security Contract ultimately resulted in payments of $124 million to Booz.
Potential waste/fraud is not even the scariest part. Hillhouse also discussed other examples of potential for abuse:
"The President's Daily Brief [PDB] is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI [Office of Director of National Intelligence] sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the US government's most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."
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"It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate....
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"Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.
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"To take an extreme example, a company frustrated with a government that's hampering its business or the business of one of its clients could introduce or spin intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with terrorists in order to get the White House's attention and potentially shape national policy.
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"Or, more subtly, a private firm could introduce concerns about a particular government to put heat on that government to shape its energy policy in a favorable direction.
"To get us into the Iraq War, intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully manipulated to short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in the intelligence community, even that fallible safeguard has been eroded. (The Nation).
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Check out Hillhouse's blog: The Spy Who Billed Me. For real examples, see BN-Politics' postings on government contractor waste, fraud and abuse.
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