The Terror Con, Booz Allen Hamilton and the NSA
(Image: UGO Entertainment)
For defense
contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and
the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat
inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz
Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyber
warfare.
That’s the company, under
contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower
Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of
Booz Allen’s enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now
threatens the firm’s profitability and that of its parent hedge fund,
the Carlyle Group.
Booz Allen, whose top
personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the
inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute
terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch
indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.
But just when the good
times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the past, there came
9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of
terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an
ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.
Just ask New York Times
columnists Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller. Rising to the defense of NSA
snooping on a scale never before imagined in human history, they warn
us that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, we would lose all of our
civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off.
“I believe that if there is
one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving nuclear material—it could
lead to the end of the open society as we know it,” Friedman wrote in
his June 11 column.
No nation in history has
ever possessed such an imbalance of military superiority and the ability
to ward off foreign threats without sacrificing its core values. Never
has this country been as vulnerable to foreign attacks as when the
founders approved our Constitution with its Fourth Amendment and other
protections of individual sovereignty against an intrusive government.
They did so out of the conviction that individual freedom makes us
stronger rather than weaker as a nation. In short, they trusted in the
essential wisdom of the people as opposed to the pundits who deride it.
Defending Friedman’s column, Keller wrote Sunday:
“Tom’s
important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is
not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a
panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the
war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”
So it’s the panicky
public’s fault and not the ill-informed work of establishment
journalists like Friedman, who led the charge to war with Iraq based on
phony claims about terrorism.
Once again, Friedman has a
misplaced faith in the work of the intelligence community. The NSA
snooping was quite extensive before 9/11 and certainly in full force
prior to the Boston Marathon attack, but did not prevent either event.
Indeed, our much-vaunted spy agencies still have not come up with an
explanation of how 19 hijackers, 15 from our ally Saudi Arabia, managed
to legally enter this country and learn flying skills while under our
government’s watch.
Nor have those intelligence
agencies explained why the only three countries that recognized the
Taliban government sponsors of al-Qaida were that same Saudi Arabia as
well as our other friends in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. For
information on the UAE connection, the NSA might check with its buddies
at Booz Allen Hamilton.
As The New York Times
reported Saturday: “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 cyber strategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the NSA
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.”
Tracking the Iranians, you
say? But they’re not the enemies who attacked us on 9/11, and indeed
they are Shiites, who were implacably hostile to the Sunni fanatics of
al-Qaida. The reasoning makes sense only if you follow the money that
the UAE can pay. “They are teaching everything,” one Arab official told
The New York Times about Booz Allen’s staffers. “Data mining, web
surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”
How great. Now, it’s not
just the government we elect but also those everywhere, even in desert
emirates, that can mine our data.
“The NSA data mining,”
Keller assures us, “is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we
are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of
privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards.”
Behold McConnell. While
director of national intelligence from 2007-09, he did much to inflate
the threat of cyberterrorism; he then returned to the private sector and
was rewarded with $4.1 million his first year back at Booz Allen,
solving the problem he had hyped while heading the NSA. There’s a guy
who knows how to play the game.
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