Meet the Counterterrorism-Industrial Complex (Ken Silverstein, Harpers)

[swag]

via Economist's View

Meet the Counterterrorism-Industrial Complex

...the pace of the movement to private firms has recently reached alarming proportions. “At the CIA,” said the Los Angeles Times story, “poaching became such a problem that former Director Porter J. Goss had to warn several firms to stop recruiting employees in the agency cafeteria . . . . One recently retired case officer said he had been approached twice while in line for coffee.” (As I noted in my recent post about Blackwater, that firm's CEO, Erik Prince, has a “green badge” that allows him access to CIA installations, and he regularly meets with senior officials at the agency's headquarters.)

Among the Times' other interesting findings:

- More than half of all employees at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) are outside contractors, and the former head of the NCC, John Brennan, is now the CEO of Analysis Corp, which supplies contract analysts to the center. The use of contractors is especially heavy at the CIA. Abraxas Corp, a firm conveniently located near the agency in McLean, Virginia, and home to many former CIA veterans, creates false identities for an elite group of overseas case officers.

- Contractors have at times outnumbered CIA employees at key stations like Baghdad and Islamabad. In Baghdad, contractors aren't simply performing bureaucratic functions; they recruit informants, manage relationships with the military, and “handle agents in support of frontline combat units.”

- Senior U.S. intelligence officials told the Times that agencies have become so dependent on contractors that they could no longer function without them. “If you took away the contractor support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down,” a former CIA official told the newspaper.

One former senior CIA official told me that the implications of the “enhanced revolving door” are being felt in a broad variety of ways. “There are many people inside who aspire to work for a private contractor because—overnight—they can at least double their earnings,” he said. “It undermines morale and doesn't build a competent system. But the bigger story is that this is symptomatic of a new ‘counterterrorism-industrial complex’ that's popping up and that is starting to look a lot like Eisenhower's military-industrial complex. It's a multibillion dollar industry and it's beginning to drive policy.”

[Dover]

[Dover]

1. Yep, it's a corporate buyout. A hostile takeover and a restructuring

of our "government" one person and one agency at a time. Fascism is what lies behind the curtain of Capitalism. The mergers of the last 20 years have made them behemouths...bigger and wealthier than many governments. Global governance is their game.

[whistle]

2. Fascism is in fact corporate capitalism characterized by the following:

<snip>
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. Controlled Mass Media
7. Obsession with National Security
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
9. Corporate Power is Protected
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent Elections
<details at> http://www.veteransforpeace.org/The_14_characteristics_030303.htm

Also what is the real threat of fascism?
<snip>
Published on Friday, September 30, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The Real Threat of Fascism
by Paul Bigioni

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970’s leads to an inescapable conclusion: the vast bulk of legislative activity favors the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the last 25 years. Digging deeper into twentieth century history, one finds this steadfast focus on the well-being of big business in other times and places. The exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity. These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America’s most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. His answer was, “Yes, but we will call it anti-fascism”.
<.....>
Neo-liberal intellectuals often recognize the need for violence to protect what they regard as freedom. Thomas Freidman of the New York Times has written enthusiastically that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist”, and that “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15…”. As in pre-fascist Germany and Italy, the laissez-faire businessmen call for the state to do their bidding even as they insist that the state should stay out of the marketplace. Put plainly, neo-liberals advocate the use of the state’s military force for the sake of private gain. Their view of the state’s role in society is identical to that of the businessmen and intellectuals who supported Hitler and Mussolini. There is no fear of the big state here. There is only the desire to wield its power. Neo-liberalism is thus fertile soil for fascism to grow again into an outright threat to our democracy.

Having said that fascism is the result of a flawed notion of freedom, I respectfully suggest that we must reexamine what we mean when we throw around the word “freedom”. We must conceive of freedom in a more enlightened way. Indeed, it was the thinkers of the Enlightenment that imagined a balanced and civilized freedom which did not impinge upon the freedom of one’s neighbor. Put in the simplest terms, my right to life means that you must give up your freedom to kill me. This may seem terribly obvious to decent people. Unfortunately, in our neo-liberal era, this civilized sense of freedom has, like the dangers of fascism, been all but forgotten.
<more>
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0930-25.htm