Corporate Media Discover Private Spies. In Other News, No WMD in Iraq

Stop the presses and call the government spokespeople back from
Martha's Vineyard.

The corporate media have discovered that the United States is radically
outsourcing national security and sensitive intelligence operations.
Cable news channels breathlessly report on the "groundbreaking,"
"exclusive" Washington Post series, Top Secret
America, a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin.
No doubt there is some important stuff in this series. Both Arkin and
Priest have done outstanding work for many years on sensitive,
life-or-death subjects. And that is one of the main reasons why this
series has, thus far, been incredibly disappointing. Its greatest
accomplishment is forcing a discussion onto corporate TV years after it
would have had an actual impact.

The misplaced hype surrounding the Post series speaks
volumes to the ahistorical nature of US media culture. Next week, if the
New York Times published a story on how there were no WMDs in
Iraq, there would no doubt be cable news shows that would act like it
was an earth-moving revelation delivered by Moses on the stone tablet of
exclusive, groundbreaking journalism.

The Post does a fine job of exploring the scope of the
privatization and providing some new or updated statistics. It also
produces a few zingers from senior officials like Defense Secretary
Robert Gates. "This is a terrible confession," Gates said in
Tuesday's installment. "I can't get a number on how many
contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense." It was
also hilarious to read CIA director Leon Panetta-who just gave
Blackwater a brand new $100
million global CIA contract-act like he is anything other than a
contractor addict. "For too long, we've depended on contractors to do
the operational work that ought to be done" by CIA employees, Panetta
told the Post. But replacing them "doesn't happen overnight.
When you've been dependent on contractors for so long, you have to build
that expertise over time." Panetta told the Post he was
concerned about contracting with corporations, whose responsibility "is
to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict." I
wonder if the Blackwater guys working for Panetta can contain their
laughter reading those statements. I imagine them taping a post-it note
that says "Kick me" on Panetta's back and then chuckling about it with
the Lockheed contractors.

The Post is "doing their best to obfuscate what contractors really
do for US intelligence. They're eight years behind and still haven't
caught up.... there's virtually nothing in their series about the
broader picture-like what it means to have private for-profit companies
operating at the highest levels of our national security."

What is perhaps most telling about the Post series is how
little detail is provided on the most sensitive operations performed by
contractors: assassinations, torture, rendition and operational
planning.

In reality, there is little in the Post series that, in one
way or another, has not already been documented by independent
journalist Tim Shorrock, author of
the (actually) groundbreaking book,Spies
for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. With
the exception of some details and a lot of color, much of what I have
read in the Post's series thus far I had already read in
Shorrock's book and his previous reporting for Salon,
Mother
Jones and The Nation.
Shorrock was the reporter who first revealed the extent of the radical
privatization of intel operations. In 2007, Shorrock obtained
and published a document from the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence showing that 70 percent of the US intelligence
budget was spent on private contractors. Shorrock was way out in front
of this story and, frankly, corporate media ignored it. When I was
working on my book on Blackwater, which first came out in 2007, Shorrock
provided me with some crucial insights into the world of privatized
intelligence. Shorrock remains a valued colleague and source and the Post
is just wrong to not credit him for the work he has done on this story.
Everyone should read Shorrock's latest
story which includes an exclusive photo tour through the private
intelligence community.

The Post and its reporters, Shorrock told me, "are doing
their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence.
They're eight years behind and still haven't caught up. Basically their
stories are throwing big numbers at readers-such as the fact that of
854,000 people with top security clearances, 265,000 are contractors.
But that's work that can be done by interns; there's virtually nothing
in their series about the broader picture-like what it means to have
private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our
national security."

Much of the series reads like a description of the mundane work of
analysts and IT people with the types of stats Shorrock mentioned thrown
in. Of course, it is meant to feel insider-ish to read the description
of the General Dynamics contractor tracking a white pick-up truck in
Afghanistan suspected of being "part of a network making roadside
bombs" and with a few clicks of the mouse revealing the history of the
vehicle, the address and identity of the driver and a list of visitors
to his house. But what about the ultra-sensitive work contractors do for
the NSA or the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office? "It's
very significant that, in their database, [the Post] eliminated
information about what key contractors do for the agencies such as
NSA," says Shorrock. "There's tons of data about these companies in
their database, but not what they actually do." (People wanting more
information on contractors doing this work, such as Booz-Allen, SAIC,
Northrop Grumman and others should check out the contractor database
Shorrock developed with CorpWatch last year.)

Also, what about the contractors who have tortured prisoners, flown
rendition flights and participated in lethal "direct actions" ie
assassination operations?

According to the July 20 article
in the Post's series: "Private contractors working for the CIA
have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in
Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals.
Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of
Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and
watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley
headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency's training
facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American
spies.... Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign
governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war
plans. They gather information on local factions in war zones."

Wow, an engaged reader might think after reading that, this will be
fascinating. Now we are getting somewhere. But instead of revealing new
details on these types of operations and naming names and employers and
specific incidents, none of that is to be found. The discussion of
torture and extrajudicial killings committed by private contractors is
relegated to a whitewashing by the Post. "Contractor
misdeeds in Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt U.S. credibility in
those countries as well as in the Middle East," Priest and Arkin write.
"Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, some of it done by contractors, helped
ignite a call for vengeance against the United States that
continues today. Security guards working for Blackwater added
fuel to the five-year violent chaos in Iraq and became the symbol
of an America run amok." [Emphases added.]

I'm sorry, Blackwater "added fuel" to "chaos?" "America run amok?"
These are very strange descriptions of the take-away message from the
massacre of seventeen innocent Iraqi civilians, the alleged murder of a
bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president and night-hunting Iraqis as
"payback" for 9/11. Not to mention the allegations of young prostitutes
performing oral sex for a dollar, guns smuggled on private planes in dog
food bags, hiding weapons from ATF agents and on and on. But more
important, where in the Post series is the examination of the
CIA assassination program that relied on Blackwater and other private
contractors? Where is the investigation of Erik Prince's hit teams that
operated in Germany and elsewhere? What about the ongoing work of
contractors in the drone bombing program? What about Blackwater
contractors calling
in air-strikes in Afghanistan or operating
covertly in Pakistan?

Also, since when is torturing prisoners a "misdeed?" According to the
Post, torture at Abu Ghraib "helped to ignite a call for
vengeance against the United States." This type of vapid description of
the consequences of heinous crimes committed by America and its proxies
has become like daily bread in corporate media outlets. The Post's
focus on the calls for vengeance rather than the incredible uphill
quest for justice in the US courts by the victims of this torture is
telling. As is the total omission of the other torture facilities
employed by the United States-some of which were revealed first by Dana
Priest and the Washington Post.

Marcy Wheeler--another
unfamous journalist who rarely gets credit from the corporate all-stars
when she scoops them-described
this aspect of the Post story on her EmptyWheel blog: "Abuse
of prisoners happened. But apparently, only at Abu Ghraib, not at
Bagram, not at Gitmo, not at firebases where detainees died. And the
names of those contractors? Their role in the abuse? The WaPo stops
short of telling you, for example, that a CACI interrogator was the one
instructing the grunts at Abu Ghraib to abuse detainees. The WaPo also
doesn't tell you the CACI contractors never paid any price for doing so.
The WaPo doesn't mention that DOD believed they had no way of holding
contractors accountable for such things (though the case of David
Passaro, in which a detainee died, of course proved that contractors
could be prosecuted)."

Perhaps the Post plans to publish a story called "Top Top
Super Duper Triple-Decker Secret America" where the paper actually
delves deep into the outsourcing of assassinations, torture, rendition,
interrogation and "find fix and finish" operations. That would truly be
ground-breaking. Until then, buy Tim Shorrock's book
and read Marcy Wheeler.