Asia Times: The tangled web of US 'intelligence'

[unhappycamper]

The tangled web of US 'intelligence'
By Tom Engelhardt
Jun 1, 2006

~snip~

Until fairly recently, newspaper articles regularly cited an iconic 15 civilian and military intelligence agencies in that all-American "community", a number now raised to 16 at the official website of the IC, and that figure doesn't even include Negroponte's new Office of the Director of National Intelligence with its nearly billion-dollar budget.

In addition to the CIA, the gang of 16 includes the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NSA (surveillance and code-breaking), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO - satellites), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA - mapping), all under the aegis of the Pentagon, as well as the intelligence agencies of each of the Armed Services and the Coast Guard.

The United States' second "defense department", the Department of Homeland Security, has its own expanding intelligence arm with a mouthful of a name: the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. (No self-respecting agency in the US government would be without one!) So do the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department, the Energy Department, the Drug Enforcement Department, and the Treasury Department.

But the iconic 16 (or 17) don't include numerous other intelligence groupings tucked away in the government. Some outsiders doing the counting have come up with upwards of 30 entities in the IC. That assumedly represents a whole heap of secret knowledge and, certainly, a whole heap of taxpayer money.

~snip~

much, much more


This is a pretty good read on the state of the US intelligence community & the power grabs between the various agencies.

[Peace Patriot]

1. The US has maintained an uneasy balance between its progressive

population (I won't go into the stats--the American people overwhelmingly favor peace, justice, fairness, inclusiveness and open, democratic government) and the desires and fetishes of the corporate/military establishment, which is mainly designed to protect the financial interests of US-based mega-corporations and expand their access to markets and resources. The latter has also been bolstered by a conspiracy of silence in the increasingly monopolistic news organizations, which are now just the propaganda wing of the corporate/military establishment. As long as these mega-corps brought prosperity and an increasing middle class to the US, the American people by and large gave a "wink and a nod" to the stealth community that enforces the will of the corporate/military establishment worldwide, and, until recently, had spied on and manipulated Americans to a lesser degree than it does elsewhere.

You have only to review the history of Iran/Contra to know how the "wink and the nod" has worked in the past. The Reagan regime, which had conducted an entirely illegal, undercover war against Nicaragua--expressly forbidden by Congress--as well as dreadful death squad killings and oppression throughout Central America, was given a slap on the wrist by a Democratic Congress for these outrages, largely due to the huge tax cuts for the upper middle class that the Reagen regime implemented, in conspiracy with well-off Democrats (as represented by their increasingly well-off political representatives). Reagan should have been impeached for the war on Nicaragua; he was not. A few underlings took the fall--and they are back in government today, with the Bush junta. I remember those Congressional hearings--and I KNEW, deep in my gut, that SOMETHING WAS WRONG.

It was this Devil's Bargain, between the people and the corporate/military power players, that had grown out of the WW II militarization of our economy. Keep us fat with well-paid corporate/military jobs, fund our schools and hospitals, spread prosperity around, be inclusive (Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965), do not violate our progressive principles here at home, and give them at least lip service abroad, and we will give the "wink and nod" to your dirty games, and allow you your "black budgets" and all the rest (within limits, with some oversight).

The loyalty of the bulk of the American people--and especially the mostly white and prosperous middle and upper-middle class--to this...thing we call "America"*...is now being stretched thinner, and thinner, and thinner, as this Devil's Bargain comes back round upon us, and, the "Devil," a) fails to keep its promises, and b) begins to extract the price of our souls without paying for them in material wealth.

* "America" does not torture. That is broken bargain #1. At least not openly, in violation of the law, and with our leaders' fangs dripping with blood as they smile like ghouls over their victims. Combine that with outsourcing of all the jobs and you have a ve-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ery thin loyalty, indeed, developing between Americans and their corporate/military dominated government. Add in a few more things--like a $10 TRILLION deficit, discovery that all the voting machines are rigged (are now owned by Republican corporations, using "trade secret," proprietary programming code to "tabulate" all the votes), and the government spying on your reading habits--and a real snapping point approaches. Hard to know what's going to happen. Probably a War/Corporate Democrat will be installed to calm things down (some sops to the progressive majority). But the thing that is "America"--that curious combo of the highest democratic and humanitarian ideals with the depths of hypocrisy and greed--is in big trouble. Big trouble can be good. Maybe the hypocrisy and greed will at last be curtailed, and the great ideals of America the Beautiful at last fully realized. Trouble is opportunity--for good as well as ill. And optimism is an American characteristic. Things don't look too good right now, but who knows? Latin America has arisen from decades of brutal oppression, to be THE shining light of democracy in the western hemisphere in 2006. Miracles CAN occur (aided by hard civic work, for instance, on TRANSPARENT elections). If Latin America can do it, so can we.