You may at first think the following is a bad joke, but I assure you it is not a joke at all. At the very end of
this NYT story
about Booz Allen and the complex interconnections between nominally
"private" business and the national intelligence community, we read:
But
the legal warnings at the end of its financial report offered a caution
that the company could be hurt by “any issue that compromises our
relationships with the U.S. government or damages our professional
reputation."
By Friday, shares of Booz Allen had slid nearly 6 percent since the revelations. And a new job posting appeared on its Web site for a systems administrator in Hawaii, “secret clearance required.”
Yes, that appears to be Edward Snowden's old job.
Crappy spy fiction doesn't look quite so crappy now, does it? In many respects -- in fact, I would argue in
every critical respect -- the spy business is actually
that dumb.
In an earlier post
about the NSA/surveillance stories,
I discussed the profoundly offensive elitism involved in the argument
that "special" people in both government and journalism, people endowed
with understanding and judgment that is the envy of the gods and forever
denied to all us ordinary schlubs, should decide what information will
be provided to the motley mass of humans who merely pay for all of it,
and for whose benefit all this godlike work is supposedly undertaken.
Talk about idiocies: "We're doing all this for
you! You're too
stupid to be told most of what we're doing!" Put it on a bumper sticker, baby, so we can throw rotten eggs at it.
I also talked about how especially unconvincing the insistence on
secrecy is, given the numbers of people who have access to Top Secret
information. The
NYT story helpfully offers some numbers.
Booz Allen
"boasts that half its 25,000 employees have Top Secret clearances..." Wait, that's nothing:
Of
the 1.4 million people with Top Secret clearances, more than a third
are private contractors. (The background checks for those clearances are
usually done by other contractors.)
The biggest open secret all these creepy jerks are hiding is the secret of corporatism (or what Gabriel Kolko calls "
political capitalism"):
There
is nothing in the world that can't be turned into a huge moneymaker for
the State and its favored friends in "private" business, at the same
time it is used to amass still greater power. This is true in multiple
forms for the fraud that is the "intelligence" industry.
The pattern is the same in every industry, from farming, to manufacturing, to every aspect of transportation, to the
health insurance scam,
to anything else you can name. In one common version, already vested
interests go to the State demanding regulation and protection from
"destabilizing" forces which, they claim, threaten the nation's
well-being (by which, they mean
competitors who threaten their
profits).
The State enthusiastically complies, the cooperative lawmakers
enjoying rewards of many kinds and varieties. Then they'll have to
enforce all those nifty regulations and controls. The State will do
some of it but, heck, it's complicated and time-consuming, ya know?
Besides, some of the State's good friends in "private" business can make
a killing doing some of the enforcing. Give it to them! Etc. and so
on.
It is for these reasons, among others, that I
have stated:
[G]iven the nature of the State and its manner of operation, it simply isn't possible for any enterprise to become and remain notably successful ... without
becoming enmeshed in the State apparatus. It's possible that a company
may escape more complex involvement with the State in its early years,
but if a company maintains its dominance over a significant period of
time, it necessarily must be the recipient of State favoritism.
And so, as but one minor example, the
Times tells us that "background checks for those clearances are usually done by other contractors."
But that's chump change. The real money is elsewhere -- in, for instance,
foreign policy itself.
You probably thought foreign policy was about dealing with threats to
"national security," spreading democracy, ensuring peace, and whatever
other lying slogans they throw around like a moldy, decaying, putrid
corpse. The State's foreign policy efforts are unquestionably devoted
to maintaining the U.S.'s advantages -- but the advantages they are most
concerned about are access to markets and, that's right, making huge
amounts of money. Despite the unending propaganda to the contrary, they
aren't terribly concerned with dire threats to our national well-being,
for the simple reason that there aren't any: "No nation would dare
mount a serious attack on the U.S. precisely because
they know how powerful the U.S. is -- because
it is not secret."
How does the public-"private" intelligence industry make foreign policy? The
NYT story offers an instructive example in its opening paragraphs:
When
the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the
National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate
the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu
Dhabi.
It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s
cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the
United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell
who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster
the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.
“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the
effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital
intelligence collection."
See how perfect this is? All the special people are making tons of money --
and,
when the day arrives that the U.S. wants to ramp up its confrontational
stance with Iran, well, there's the UAE helping to "track the Iranians"
with all the tools that the U.S. has given them and taught them to use.
And how easy would it be to get the UAE to provide the U.S. with just
the right kind of new and disturbing "intelligence" that would get lots
of people screaming about the "grave Iranian threat"? You know the
answer to that: easy peasy. A wink and a nod -- and off the U.S. goes,
with bombing runs or whatever it decides to do. But whatever it does
will be determined in greatest part not by a genuine threat to U.S.
national security (there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that
Iran's leaders
are all suicidal), but by what will make the most money for the State and its good friends.
I remind you once again of what I call The Higgs Principle. As I have
emphasized, you can apply this principle to every significant policy in
every area, including every aspect of foreign policy. Here is Robert
Higgs explaining it:
As a general rule for understanding
public policies, I insist that there are no persistent "failed"
policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the
actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the
U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years,
you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics:
follow the money.
When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful,
so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and
shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which
is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in
determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the
hundreds of billions of dollars.
So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and
confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the "peace process"
never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the
policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne
by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the
bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.
How much is the intelligence-security industry worth? The
NYT story offers this toward the end:
Only
last month, the Navy awarded Booz Allen, among others, the first
contracts in a billion-dollar project to help with “a new generation of
intelligence, surveillance and combat operations."
The new push is to take those skills to American allies, especially at a
time of reduced spending in Washington. So while the contract with the
United Arab Emirates is small, it may be a model for other countries
that see cyberdefense — and perhaps offense — as their future. The
company reported net income of $219 million in the fiscal year that
ended on March 31. That was up from net income of $25 million in 2010,
shortly after Mr. McConnell returned to the company.
They're just getting started. Note that the $219 million is
net income. Earlier, the
Times told us that
"more than half its $5.8 billion in annual revenue [is] coming from the military and the intelligence agencies." The story also informs us that: "Booz Allen is
one of many companies that make up the digital spine of the intelligence world, designing the software and hardware systems on which the N.S.A. and other military and intelligence agencies depend."
It's all about
wealth and
power. Here and there, in
episodes notable only for their rarity, "the intelligence world" might
actually provide a small piece of information actually related to
"national security." Again, I turn
to Gabriel Kolko:
It
is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States
is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before
it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage
rational behavior--although sometimes that occurs--than to justify a
nation's illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional
wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only
increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet,
and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and
often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that
were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent
dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has
been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or
bureaucratic reasons for doing so.
The incessant chatter about the indispensable, critical importance of "intelligence" to "national security" is
marketing, the time-tested phrases that the ruling class knows are so popular with most Americans. And Americans dearly
love the marketing:
So
all of the feigned bafflement and incessant caterwauling about the
supposedly indecipherable actions of the United States -- Why, oh why, did we invade Iraq?, and Why, dear God, are we in Afghanistan? -- represent only the capitulation of the purported critics to precisely those arguments U.S. leaders hope you will engage. They want you to spend all your time on those
arguments, because they're only marketing ploys having nothing at all
to do with their actual goals. As I said the other day, if you want to
stop this murderous madness -- and I dearly hope you do -- forget about
what they say their goals are (fostering "democratic" governments,
“regional stability,” “security,” and all the associated claptrap), and
focus on the real problem: the carefully chosen policy of U.S. geopolitical dominance over the entire globe.
In
the midst of the rush of revelations concerning the NSA and
surveillance, almost everyone forgets that the "intelligence" industry
is founded on one of the most momentous lies in the history of
statecraft. As I write this, I see
the following:
National
Security Agency Director Keith Alexander told a House committee Tuesday
that 50 terror threats in 20 countries have been disrupted with the
assistance of two secret surveillance programs that were recently
disclosed by former defense contractor Edward Snowden.
Ooooohhhhh!
50 terror threats in 20 countries, and "At least 10 of the plots
targeted the U.S. homeland." These guys suck stylistically, too. It's
exactly 50! And exactly 20! But kinda around 10 that targeted the
"homeland." C'mon, Keith. Precision is important in propaganda.
Emulate a master: "I have
here in my hand a list
of 205 terror plots...!!"
Of course, they will never provide any evidence to prove the truth of these claims. You're too
stupid
to be trusted with such information. You just have to take their word
for it. Right. I wonder how many of these frightening plots were ones
dreamed up by government agents themselves. And I wonder how many of
them were, in fact, discovered by mundane, old-fashioned "police work."
Not incidentally, I wonder how many of these plots occurred at all.
I repeat again, for approximately the fiftieth time, that "intelligence"
is almost always wrong. Don't take my word for it: read the excerpt
from Chalmers Johnson here. Read
this. And
this. See all the articles linked at the conclusion
of this article.
I've been writing about this subject for almost a decade. With the
exception of 14 or 15 people, no one listens to a goddamned word I say
on this subject (or on any other; don't worry, I don't love you any less
-- but I suggest you keep in mind that the least charitable
interpretation of that last statement is the correct one). Many of you
are now commencing to piss me off in a serious way.
The intelligence-security industry isn't about protecting the United
States or you, except for extraordinarily rare, virtually accidental
occurrences. It's about
wealth and
power. Yet every
politician and every government functionary speaks reverently of the
sacred mission and crucial importance of "intelligence" in the manner of
a syphilitic preacher who clutches a tatty, moth-eaten doll of the
Madonna, which he digitally manipulates by sticking his fingers in its
orifices. Most people would find his behavior shockingly obscene, if
they noticed it. But they don't notice it, so mesmerized are they by
the preacher with his phonily awestruck words about the holy of holies
and the ungraspably noble purpose of his mission. Even as the
suppurating sores on the preacher's face ooze blood and pus, his
audience can only gasp, "We must pay attention to what he says! He
wants only the best for us! He's trying to
save us!"
What the preacher says -- what every politician and national security official says on this subject -- is a
goddamned lie.
The ruling class has figured out yet another way to make a killing,
both figuratively and literally. They want wealth and power, and always
more wealth and power. That's what "intelligence" and "national
security" is about, and nothing else at all. When you hear Keith
Alexander, or James Clapper, or Barack Obama talk about "intelligence"
and surveillance, how your lives depend on them, and why you must trust
them to protect you if you wish to continue existing at all, think of
the preacher. Think of his open sores, of the blood and pus slowly
dribbling down his face.
All of them are murdering crooks running a racket. They are intent on
amassing wealth and power, and they've stumbled on a sure-fire way to
win the acquiescence, and often the approval, of most people. They are
driven by the worst of motives, including their maddened knowledge that
there will always remain a few people and events that they will be
unable to control absolutely. For the rest of us, their noxious games
are a sickening display of power at its worst. For us, on a faster or
slower schedule, in ways that are more or less extreme, their lies and
machinations are only a Dance of Death.
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