A movie critic, reviewing John Wayne’s 1968 gung-ho film, The Green Berets, said that Wayne had reduced the complex issues behind the Vietnam war to the simplicity of a barroom brawl.
In the same vein, the American news media displays a genius for ignoring the complexities of a major news story and focusing on just a single, sensationalistic aspect of it.
Take the Paula Deen scandal. The media universally focused on Deen’s admitted use of the “N-word”–and utterly ignored far more important aspects of the story.
According to the complaint filed in the lawsuit, employees at the restaurant were routinely subjected to violent behavior, racial and sexual harassment, assault, bettery and sexual discrimination in pay.
Similarly, in covering the odyssey of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee turned mass secret leaker, the media have followed the same path.
Edward Snowden
Following Snowden’s disappearance from the United States, the media focused their attention on charting the almost daily whereabouts of Snowden.
Would Snowden receive amnesty in Hong Kong? In Russia? In Cuba? China? Venezuela? Nicaragua?
For the moment, he has settled on Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, is keeping a protective eye on him.
Yet even though he has momentarily obtained asylum, there’s no guarantee it will last.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the international terrorist better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” can attest to that.
By 1994, he had spent almost 20 years on the run from the French Intellilgence agents. They were seeking him for a series of terrorist attacks across France–and for the 1975 murders of two counter-intellilgence agents and their informant.
Carlos “The jackal”
After living in a series of countries that had no extradition treaty with France–such as Syria, Iraq and Jordan–he settled down in the Sudanese city of Khartoum.
He felt utterly safe, since he had been accorded official protection by the Sudanese government. But he had misjudged his protectors.
French and American Intelligence agencies offered a number of deals to the Sudanese authorities. In 1994, Carlos was scheduled to undergo a minor testicular operation in a Sudanese hospital.
Two days after the operation, Sudanese officials warned him of an assassination plot–and moved him to a villa for protection. They also provided him with bodyguards.
One night later, the bodyguards entered his room while he slept, tranquilized and tied him up–and slipped him into the custody of his longtime pursuers.
On August 14, 1994, Sudan transferred him to French Intelligence agents, who flew him to Paris for trial. He is now serving two sentences of life imprisonment.
There is no guarantee that any nation that guarantees the security of Edward Snowden today won’t decide, in the future, to betray him.
And, eventually he will run out of secrets to spill. That’s assuming that Russian and/or Chinese Intelligence agents haven’t already helped themselves to the secrets on his laptop.
As Mr. Spock once famously said during an episode of Star Trek: “Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.”
So where does the significance of the Snowden story lie?
In the fact that Americans have become too lazy or fearful to do most of their own spying.
Yes, that’s right–60 to 70% of America’s Intelligence budget doesn’t go to the CIA or the National Security Agency (NSA) or the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Instead, it goes to private contractors who supply secrets or “soldiers of fortune.”
One such contractor is Booz Allen Hamilton–which employed Snowden and gave him access to the super-secret NSA.
The outsourcing of government intelligence work to private contractors took off after 9/11.
This was especially true after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003–and found its Intelligence and armed services stretched to their furtherest limits.
The DIA estimates that, from the mid-1990s to 2005, the number of private contracts awarded by Intelligence agencies rose by 38%.
During that same period, government spending on “spies/guns for hire” doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.
Many tasks and services once performed only by government employees are being “outsourced” to civilian contractors:
- Analyzing Intelligence collected by drones and satellites;
- Writing reports;
- Creating and maintaining software programs to manipulate data for tracking terrorist suspects;
- Staffing overseas CIA stations;
- Serving as bodyguards to government officials stationed overseas;
- Providing disguises used by agents working undercover.
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman, warned of the dangers of relying on mercenaries:
“There are two types of armies that a prince may use to defend his state: armies made up of his own people or mercenaries….
“Mercenaries…are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal.
“They are brave among friends, among enemies they are cowards.
“They have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is. For in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.”
Machiavelli, on meeting Edward Snowden, would no doubt find his judgment confirmed.
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MERCS FOR HIRE: PART TWO (END)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 15, 2014 at 12:33 amThe 1960 Kirk Douglas epic, Spartacus, may soon prove to be more than great entertainment. It may also turn out to be a prophecy of the end of the American Republic.
Throughout the movie, wealthy Romans assume they can buy anything–or anyone. When seeking a favor, Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Oliver) says bluntly: “Name your price.”
Today, “Name your price” has become the password for entry into America’s Intelligence community.
Althugh not portrayed in Spartacus, one of the reasons for the fall of the Roman empire lay in its reliance on foreign mercenaries.
Roman citizens, who had for centuries manned their city’s legions, decided to outsource these hardships and dangers to hired soldiers from Germany and Gaul (now France).
Although Germans and Gauls had proven capable fighters when defending their own countries, they proved highly unrelible as paid mercenaries.
Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of political science, drew heavily on ancient history for his examples of how liberty could best be preserved within a republic.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Fully aware of the Romans’ disastrous experience with mercenaries, Machiavelli believed that a nation’s army should be driven by patriotism, not greed. Speaking of mercenaries, he warned:
“Mercenaries…are useless and dangerous. And if a prince holds on to his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal; they are brave among friends, among enemies they are cowards.”
Americans–generally disdainful of history–have blatantly ignored both the examples of history and the counsel of Machiavelli. To their own peril.
Mark Mazzetti, author of the bestselling The Way of the Knife, chronicles how the CIA has been transformed from a primarily fact-finding agency into a terrorist-killing one.
Along with this transformation has come a dangerous dependency on private contractors to supply information that government agents used to dig up for themselves.
America’s defense and Intelligence industries, writes Mazzetti, once spread across the country, have relocated to the Washington area.
They want to be close to “the customer”: The National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the CIA and an array of other Intelligence agencies.
The U.S. Navy SEALS raid that killed Osama bin Laden has been the subject of books, documentaries and even an Oscar-nominated movie: “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Almost unknown by comparison is a program the CIA developed with Blackwater, a private security company, to locate and assassinate Islamic terrorists.
“We were building a unilateral, unattributable capability,” Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, said in an interview. “If it went bad, we weren’t expecting the [CIA] chief of station, the ambassador or anyone to bail us out.”
But the program never got past the planning stage. Senior CIA officials feared the agency would not be able to permanently hide its own role in the effort.
“The more you outsource an operation,” said a CIA official, “the more deniable it becomes. But you’re also giving up control of the operation. And if that guy screws up, it’s still your fault.”
Increased reliance on “outsourcing” has created a “brain-drain” within the Intelligence community. Jobs with private security companies usually pay 50% more than government jobs.
Many employees at the CIA, NSA and other Intelligence agencies leave government service–and then return to it as private contractors earning far higher salaries.
Many within the Intelligence community fear that too much Intelligence work has been outsourced and the government has effectively lost control of its own information channels.
And, as always with the hiring of mercenaries, there is an even more basic fear: How fully can they be trusted?
“There’s an inevitable tension as to where the contractor’s loyalties lie,” said Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel for the CIA. “Do they lie with the flag? Or do they lie with the bottom line?”
Yet another concern: How much can Intelligence agencies count on private contractors to effectively screen the people they hire?
Edward Snowden, it should be remembered, was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting/security firm. It was through this company that Snowden gained access to a treasury of NSA secrets.
In March 2007, the Bush administration revealed that it paid 70% of its intelligence budget to private security contractors. That remains the case today–and the Intelligence budget for 2012 was $75.4 billion.
A 2010 investigative series by the Washington Post found that “1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the country.”
Jesus never served as a spy or soldier. But he clearly understood a truth too many officials within the American Intelligence community have forgotten:
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
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