The ways in which the Bush war has degraded the structures and culture of Iraq are obvious. Less so are its insidious effects on the United States, but President Bush is similarly destroying something essential to our own democracy. A signal of that was sounded last week when The Washington Post reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency is transferring “core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection” to private contractors — up to a billion dollars worth. This raises the prospect that hired guns, instead of sworn officials, will be conducting covert operations, spying missions, interrogations, “renditions,” surveillance — the whole dangerous complex of shadow activity that began as the government’s most sensitive responsibility.
Given the often shocking record of what US intelligence officials have done over the years, why does it matter if such activities are carried out by contractors? The answer patently goes to the question of accountability. Public servants who are bound by oaths to the Constitution and the law understand what the measure of behavior must be, even if they fall short of it. Activities involving the surreptitious, especially, have properly been reserved to public institutions subject to political oversight. Private parties, bound by contract, operate at remove from such limit and accountability, which may be why borderline activities like interrogation or rendition are increasingly farmed out to them.
But there is a deeper problem. I know the dark history well, yet I also know that the American intelligence services were founded, then staffed across two generations, by patriots — people who acted primarily out of loyalty to this country. If at times they acted wrongly, they mainly did so with a sense of higher purpose. Among the most gifted and well educated people in government, intelligence officials could always have done better in the private sector, but personal gain was never the point. The ethos of service informed their commitment. That was broadly true of the military, which is why “service” is its synonym. But that word, as in “secret service,” defined the essence of the government’s most dangerous work — dangers both physical and moral.
But now intelligence activities, like security functions in Iraq, are increasingly carried out for the sake of large paychecks. True belief has its problems, but so does the no-belief of greed. The Post reported that “outsourced” intelligence operatives cost, on average, twice what comparable government employees are paid. This has resulted in something new — the resignations of trained and trusted officials who take jobs with contractors to perform the same operations, but with far higher pay. Whether their activities are different or not, they themselves are. Such ex-officials are dismantling politically accountable structures, and undercutting an ideal of selflessness that formerly made the custodians of state power its most important check.
Readers of this column may know that the Defense Intelligence Agency was founded by my father in 1961. Not long before, he had declined an offer from the Ford Motor Company to take a big job in Detroit, a chance at true affluence. My parents were typical products of immigrant culture, people who so loved America for its welcome that the highest privilege they could imagine was to spend their lives in its service. In this, newcomers were like the “best and brightest” of the establishment — the patriots who first stamped the culture of American intelligence. I know for certain that, in setting out the ethos of the DIA, my father assumed love of country, and sacrifice for it, as foundational. He would not have entrusted the difficult and, perhaps, dirty work for which he found himself responsible to people who thought differently. Profit-driven contractors for core functions of the agency? My father would not have understood what you were talking about.
As the Post suggests, the Bush administration has replaced officials with contractors throughout government, outsourcing run amok. But Bush did not begin this. Since Ronald Reagan, conservatives have preached the doctrine that the nation’s basic needs can best be met by private enterprise. The profit motive trumps any public ideal. Consequently, government has been in slow motion collapse, with the ineptitudes of Iraq as final proof of its untrustworthiness.
But what the antigovernment movement missed is that attacks on the public sector equal assaults on the public. When the high calling of public service yields to the highest bid, the corruption is total: the heart of government — the military — becomes mercenary; the mind of the military — intelligence — becomes privatized. Citizenship itself is universally gutted, yet another source of our malaise.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
© 2007 The Boston Globe
Hard to get an unbiased opinion on anything in a marketplace of ideas. In the marketplace of ideas, information is like music: people are sold what they want to hear.
Let’s say that Bush & Co. had a chance to go one step further: complete privatization of the judicial/law/enforcement systems as well. We’re already part way there: presumption of innocence has largely yielded to a new slogan in practice: guilty until proven rich. A team of the best lawyers that money can buy, right-wing activist judges, an ideologically stacked Supreme Court, etc. But let’s say they took it another notch. After privatizing the jails, they privatized the courts and local police departments. Would it be a crime to impersonate a private cop? A private judge? Indeed, what’s the difference between bribing a private judge and buying one in the marketplace of laws?
Or to leak privately obtained national security information?
Laws are, at their root, essentially socialistic constructs at least in the abstract. They are a body of rules that all of society agrees to play by, regardless of income.
Information is arguably that way too. Some (especially mathematicians) even argue that it exists independently of people. The privatization of intelligence is therefore best understood, philosophically, as the bootstrapping of money and vendor connections around information. That sort of information isn’t prone to bias: it IS bias.
There is no accountability in the Bush Government.
That construct is out the window.
The deepest pocket is the US treasury.
After not paying taxes, the rich have figured out a way to pilfer straight from it- put some fellow filths in charge of it.
This is a common occurence in third world countries, and that is why the oridnary folk can’t get ahead.
The nobility of America’s past is why this nation is still a magnet for some immigrants.
The values that have been established throught he blood of many are now been washed away in a flood of Greed.
And there are very few that will stand up to this flood. Lest theirs is the blood that flows.
James Carroll continues to be one of America’s most trustworthy voices in print on issues of ethics and morality in government.
In “Outsourcing Intelligence” Carroll addresses a problem that has plagued American politics since the findings of the Church Committee’s 14 Reports to Congress in the mid-1970s resulted in The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). One unintended result of the Church Committee’s investigations and FISA was the outsourcing of domestic political intelligence gathering and operations, which had previously been carried out by municipal police departments, county, and state police agencies as well as the FBI. Private organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League’s “fact-finders”, took advantage of the opportunity engage in and profit from domestic political intelligence gathering activities. The ADL became a clearing-house for domestic political intelligence in subsequent years and decades. FBI counter-intelligence officials investigated and sought to reign in the ADL’s illegal domestic intelligence activities in the early 1990s, with limited effect, the result being the ADL Spy Scandal of 1993-1994. See http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/1299/9912043.html
we all slept while this was happening.
we are asleep now - but not peacefully.
It happened right in front of us.
we were concerned about all those civil servants getting a free ride (according to the privateers).
I hope it’s not too late!
Throw in a couple of Blackwaters and a handful of Halliburton “special programs” detention centers, and we got ourselves one hellava private justice system - the mercs hunt ya down and catch ya, and the loyalbushies store you until further notice.
Now if we could just privatize the judges…
Too bad we can’t outsource Shrub & Co. He made a shrewd move with the Gonzo debacle, though. Now the jackass will appoint whomever he pleases while Congress is on break and they will serve til the end of the 1st Idiot’s term is over. Chertoff or the other one, the Solicitor General, both suck up to Bush, so that will make NO difference.
So interesting to listen to politicos say, well, this was a good thing. Wrong, again! He may be an idiot, but, his advisers are very politically savvy, and Rove is still there until the end of the month.
Next, 1st Idiot just has to pull a few troops home, a handful at a time and he is Mr. Good Guy and what happens to the Demos platforms? Must turn to domestic issues and health care, period.
PAUL BRAMSCHER: Good points. Couple the tenets of this article with the one on statistics (that in our nation with a 1% mistake on statistical screening processes, a cool 3 million could be held for terroristm) and the recipe for criminalizing “dissent” and dealing with opposition voices gets more chilling by the mili-second.
Out sourcing intelligence about Saddam’s nonexistant WMDs is what got Bush in Iraq…..
frank1569 August 27th, 2007 3:54 pm
“Now if we could just privatize the judges…”
I like your sense of humor, frank.
“In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court held that, under the Constitution, a private corporation was a ‘natural person’, entitled to all the rights and privileges of a human being.”
I remember in college studying a landmark experiment in which subjects felt no need to justify their less than ethical actions when paid to commit them. They could blame it on the money. No doubt this tendency is at the forefront of the current powers mongers’ desire for contracted “public” servants. More than anything else ultimate power comes from the control of information.
Lord Acton of Britain in 1887 said the following;
Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely
This might be an opportunity for Joseph and Valerie Plame Wilson to put together a little mom-and-pop startup.
The CIA has never been on a leash and they have always been willing to do anything to anyone for EMPIRE. I mean ANYTHING.
Shoot’em up with plutonium to see how they die. Fuck’em up with drugs to try and make a human robot. Killing people was the least of what they did - back to ‘47 when we were creating our last ‘permanent’ enemy.
Yes, let us weep for our unaccountable CIA, OUR BEST AND BRIGHTEST.
Peece.
re kernel 8/28 1:10am
hazmat’s corollary to lord acton: power attracts the corruptible.
The CIA back in 47 was a giant step if not the start of the privatization of the War Machine.
JFK took Ike’s warning about those guys (Allen Dulles, Hoover and Bush gang of Skull and Bones) seriously and when he was in conflict with the War Machine after Bay of Pigs, JFK created the DIA to take on the CIA,
The problem was that these men, like General Carol, were good guys trying to reform Satan’s Den… The CIA and the banking backers.
In the organizational charts they were under the CIA and Joint
Chiefs so They became tools of the War Business instead of men who could save their creator, JFK or be a real check on the War Profiteers..
My friend Phil Ochs was recruited in DIA (Air force) as a domestic asset back at Ohio State (ROTC) and we were studying the CIA and the War business together as much as we could and we were both set up to be in Texas to observe the plot to kill JFK and we were told about it many months before Nov 63.
The problem is always that the “Good Guys” in the War Machine follow the orders of the bosses, and when it comes to National Security, they are also compelled to cover up the Racket of War because soldiers are trained and take an Oath to be Loyal to the Flag and Country, so in any big mystery, the system gets the benefit of all doubt…Phil, my friend, took the old honorable way of the Warrior Samurai and committed suicide…their weren’t many whistle blowers back then.
Jim
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10194&st=45
“A signal of that was sounded last week when The Washington Post reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency is transferring “core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection” to private contractors — up to a billion dollars worth. This raises the prospect that hired guns, instead of sworn officials, will be conducting covert operations, spying missions, interrogations, “renditions,” surveillance — the whole dangerous complex of shadow activity that began as the government’s most sensitive responsibility.”
Please stop the fear mongering. this is in fact very old news if you don’t wait for the government approved broadcasts of the 5 corporate media giants. Mother Jones, even Common Dreams had plenty of articles online and in print describing in detail the use of mercenaries in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. then they appeared in New Orleans as well, riding the same Humvees hanging off the sides of their vehicles like Rambo wannabe’s shotguns in hand.
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/
Check ‘em out. Good outfit actually. They have been a military for hire to 3rd world drug lords and cartels as well as DEA operations overseas since its inception by a former Navy Seal in 1994. I believe Clinton may have even used them some in Bosnia and Serbia/Kosovo. The real question is why the media neglected to cover this until now and why suddenly is this an issue?
Do you really think tha this will change? Hardly. We are ass deep in blood in 3 wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. We are already running covert ops with these guys in Iran right now. Israel is also running covert ops there right now. There was the announcement of a multi BILLION dollar arms deal to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. Our own self created AXIS of TERROR with us (the US) as the Medusa head.
There is the idea of reinstituting the draft. Realistically since the Bush Rogue Regime of Terror has turned our armed forces into the worlds police for corporate oil we cannot sustain this level of activity without the use of mercenaries or a draft. A draft will never happen if the Repug’s get their way. It cuts into their war profiteering. Dim’s will call for a draft as a way of using the deaths of young children to punish the Repug’s. The wars will continue regardless of whic party gets their way and mercenaries are here to stay.
Unless of course we take a different course of action and actually rebuild some of the world we have so carefully destroyed and allow the people living in these places to at least feed themselves and have access to water in their own lands…
Oh never mind that might actually be something Jesus would do…
Mix this privatization of intelligence gathering with large multi national corporations that do not have an allegiance to the US with a Russia that is becoming more active in murder for political purposes and you have a very dangerous and unaccountable world.
It looks like we are losing the rule of law and returning even more to the rule of power. might makes right. (NOT imo)
Who would ever want to get involved with spying for the US now? except people who want money? I think our information will be very tainted and the decisions will be poor because the information will be of a poor quality.
I think we once stood for something good. Didn’t we?
In the recent book written about the history of the CIA ( Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner) it was described how the people in the CIA were a very diverse group that went from college professors to criminals. I guess now we will see more criminal involvement in intelligence gathering (such a nice way to say spying along with the renditions and torture)
See the new Bourne Identity film and I hope more films and books come out that will look at these people who will kill for peace.
At least on CSpan I notice many callers were very critical of Gonzales. Are people waking up? finally? Will Americans be able to undo all this damage done by the Bush administration? I still believe that if people knew and understood what has been going on the vast majority would not support these policies which are counter to the founding American principles.
“But what the antigovernment movement missed is that attacks on the public sector equal assaults on the public. When the high calling of public service yields to the highest bid, the corruption is total: the heart of government — the military — becomes mercenary; the mind of the military — intelligence — becomes privatized. Citizenship itself is universally gutted, yet another source of our malaise.”
What say the Libertarian presence on these boards?
The silence is deafening.
In the midst of all the Islam terrorism hysteria, there was a story on the 6:30 World News about some older white man–militia KKK type with gestapo patriotism- they had accidently fell upon his arsenal–including chemical weapons. Never heard another peep, but we heard the likes of Hillary accusing the Muslim men in NY state–who turned out to be innocent, (excepting their ethnic identity)- and like most of the trumped-up Islamicfascist stories, it faded away. Still, here was this older white man with an arsenal of chemical weapons and no one said “boo”.
What worries me about our “intelligence” is that abides by a skewed patriotism of militarism and allegiance to romanticized ideals of democracy while viewing dissent and socialism as the greatest threat. Once I saw one of those retired Spooks, who had written a book, on CSpan, and a member of the audience asked about domestic terrorism–Timothy McVeigh and the Right-wing militias. The Spook totally ignored the subject and started ranting about animal rights activists as the grestest domestic terrorist threat.
Coming soon: We can’t end the war (the unending one) or Americans will lose their jobs!!!!!! To say otherwise is Economic Terrorism.
War Co. — a corporation too big to be allowed to “fail” by possibilities of pesky peace. And this is the party that claims moral high-ground to appeal to the Christian voting block?
The latest is that Congress is considering a bill by which Congress will outsource itself.
In the future, this relationship between the government and Big Business could backfire. As if foreign espionage and AIPAC-like influence couldn’t be enough to distort our national decision-making processes - for-profit espionage businesses could easily blackmail the government, government employees, exaggerate and distort information and analyses for profit maximization.
“Mr. President, We’ve found a nuclear bomb-making facility in a foreign country… However, if you don’t pay our company an additional 6 million per year and me an extra 500,000 yearly bonus for the next five years, I won’t tell you what that country is. By the way, the specific coordinates are an extra 12 mil.”
“You’re fired.”
“Mr. President, I think you’ve said the wrong thing. 10 mill per year, 800,000 bonus for five years…”
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