Pentagon and Contractors One Happy Family?

Pentagon and Contractors One Happy Family?
by Tim Shorrock


AHOMA, Calif. - A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America has just awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to a company that employs a top aide to former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract.0119 01

The company winning the contract was QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America (QNA), a major British-owned defence and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia. On Jan. 7, QNA’s Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, signed a five-year, 30-million-dollar contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office known as CIFA.Since 2003, CIFA has been the Pentagon’s lead domestic intelligence agency and is one of the largest employers of private contractors within the U.S. intelligence community. In 2004, it was reprimanded by Congress for spying on U.S. antiwar and religious activists opposed to the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policies.

QNA’s contract was awarded just two months after QinetiQ hired Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defence for intelligence and a longtime Rumsfeld aide, as its vice president for strategy. Cambone is the most senior of a savvy group of former high-ranking Pentagon and intelligence officials hired by QinetiQ to manage its expansion in the 50-billion-dollar U.S. market for intelligence outsourcing services.

While he was at the Pentagon, Cambone oversaw CIFA and was deeply involved in the Pentagon’s most controversial intelligence programmes. It was Cambone, for example, who reportedly issued orders to Major General Geoffrey Miller to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators in Abu Ghraib in 2003. With Rumsfeld, he also set up a special unit within the Pentagon that alienated the CIA and the State Department by running its own covert actions without seeking input from other agencies.

The new CIFA contract comes on the heels of a series of QinetiQ deals inked with the Pentagon in the booming new business of “network centric warfare” — the space-age technology-driven intelligence and warfighting policies established by Rumsfeld and Cambone during their six-year tenures at the Pentagon. Other Cambone-pioneered programmes that QinetiQ has won include military drones and robots, low-flying satellites and jamming technologies.

Cambone’s appointment at QinetiQ reflects the “incestuous” relationships that exist between former officials and private intelligence contractors, said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and a long-time observer of U.S. intelligence.

“It’s unseemly, and what’s worse is that it has become normal,” he said in an interview. The problem, he added, “is not so much a conflict of interest as it is a coincidence of interests — the intelligence community and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical.”

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/19/6481/

at least it would do somebody some good.

I hope the Democrats can get into office and shrink government down so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Is this how the Republicans' saw the government, dark and evil, overarching, pervasive, smothering, creeping, grey killer fog, of death, for the rich. No for the poor, then it was bad. I'm hatin' life.