Finished reading Tim Shorrock’s “Spies for Hire” about two weeks ago, and the book has not received the attention it deserves. I would suggest reading it in tandum with Richard Clarke’s recent book as they link very nicely.

Shorrock is essentially a Business reporter, and what he does is examine the Intelligence Industrial Complex that has come into full bloom in the second Bush Administration, and as a result, today about 70% of the CIA’s budget is outsourced. Increasingly the role of leadership and personnel in our security agencies is procurement, contract management etc., not actually doing the work of spying, reporting and analysis themselves. Shorrock has all sorts of estimates, for instance, of the percentage of the President’s Daily Brief that is prepared by private Intelligence Contractors, as opposed to the agencies that should be responsible to the executive. In many respects, CIA, DIA, and others simply are places to train junior officers — it takes 4-5 years to train a professional in Intelligence, and get them fully cleared. Then they can market their clearances at 3-4 times pay in Federal Agencies, doing the same work — in some cases at the same desk at Langley. Needless to say this does nothing in terms of the seeming intent of Congress in recent years in increasing agency budgets — namely hire and train more people to higher competence. The result is the hollowing out of many parts of these agencies and their programs.

Apparently Congressional Leadership became concerned with this even before the Democrats came into control — and began to let the agencies know they were ready to limit outsourcing — and Nancy apparently got a promise that CIA would try to push the 70% back to 60% — but that is a chicken feed promise, particularly because they seemingly are totally unwilling to evaluate the products of these contracts, evaluate quality. From Shorrock’s perspective one purpose of outsourcing may well be to shield programs from the Intelligence Oversight Committees.

There are other implications. It privatizes the product of Intelligence Programs, meaning that they are no longer subject to eventual declassification, or to FOIA requests and the like. Contracts also don’t specify what is to be done with raw data on persons or financial matters that may be collected in an intelligence program. They may belong to the Contractor and not to the Government agency that generated the contract.

I would assume that a “Church Committee” would deal with this aspect of things, or that Shorrock hopes to encourage that. If they are talking about a Legislative Commission, something structured like the 9/11 committee, the point would be to propose Legislative Actions — it would not be to hold evil dooers responsible for their evil. It would only be if you had a parallel process run out of DOJ — a special prosecutor equipt with a grand jury, that criminal or civil actions against individuals or in the case of outsourcing — Contractors, could go forward.

In straight political terms, I must admit I am a bit torn on all this. Should Obama get elected, and have a strong majority in both the House and Senate, I think he has to deal in “deliverables” — the promises that have been made in the campaign, Health Care for instance, sorting out the huge economic and financial institution problems, executing the end of Iraq’s occupation, — things that so many people are struggling with on a daily basis. He will have a small window to show he can deliver — 2010 is also an election year. If he doesn’t deliver, the opportunity will end. I think most congresscritters will also be motivated to “deliver” and will not be interested in investing all that much in the evils of the Bush Years.

CSPAN Book-TV with Jane Mayer

http://www.booktv.org/program……ayMedia=No

Jane Mayer was on Cspan with Steve Clemons last week.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.c…..alert_for/

A “new” Church Committee? So what?

Let’s say that something like this actually happens (which is a stretch in itself), and the resulting report calls for a variety of reforms. That will mean nothing if those who are charged with conducting the new systems simply don’t care to do so.

I think we’ve seen during the past eight years that both parties are filled with corrupt, venal, cowardly politicians who care little or nothing for the Constitution and the rule of law despite the oaths they’ve all taken to protect, defend, and enforce them.

Further, if existing laws were actually enforced, there’d be no need for new ones–that won’t be enforced, either. Plenty of legal muscle is available in existing law to take care of what the Bush regime and their Democratic enablers have done to besmirch the reputation of the United States and to violate U.S. and international law.

For me, it’s first things first: I won’t vote for anyone who won’t promise to insist the nation’s laws be enforced, no matter who breaks them or for what reason, and further, who then will go on to actually follow through. In other words, just do your damned jobs, Congress. Then maybe I’d support some kind of lessons learned commission. Fool me once (which way too many of them did)…

Would a Church Commission be a good idea or would it be better to just declassify everything and let the blogs sort through it we have the personal and work cheap:)

Eeps. I just remembered: Mukasey is up before the HJC in ten minutes, less. There is a webcast link at their site; haven’t checked C-SPAN yet.

I had the misfortune of living with someone who insisted we watch the first season of “24″ when it premiered. Somehow it figures that these damn Bushies would use something like that for ‘inspiration’. I found the show to be one of the stupidest, poorly written ‘dramatic’ series I had seen in a long time. The plot twists were ridiculously unbelievable and the major female characters seemed either too stupid to breathe on their own or utterly venal. Utter & complete tripe.

But on the other hand, what’s so bad about a ‘witch hunt’ anyway? Being ‘too nice’ is not a virtue…

just wondering if this is the Church Committee staffer

Frederick (Fritz) A. O. Schwarz, Jr. is the senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. He had been a partner with the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore since 1969.

Schwarz was the lead counsel for the Church Committee, a Senate committee formed in 1975 in reaction to the Watergate scandal that investigated executive overreach stretching back to the FDR administration, eventually issuing 14 reports over three years. Certain aspects of the report ring true with respect to more recent administrations as well:

“Secrecy is essential to covert operations; secrecy can, however, become a source of power, a barrier to serious policy debate within the government, and a means of circumventing the established checks and procedures of government.”

Weren’t Rockefeller, Hoyer and Pelosi privy to some of this information. Really, I don’t see how some congresscritters can redeem their reputations after all this. So Comey and Goldsmith were objecting to the use of the Main Core? And this is just plain scary. The chances of being in this database are definitely greater than winning lotto:

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans’ lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU’s Steinhardt, it would be “pretty frightening stuff.”

So if Chimpy decides “red alert”, 8 million citizens could be detained at Gitmo or wherever. And congress gives the paranoiacs in the Chimp administration a blank check. Lovely. I need someone to hold my hand.