http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3345/81/The Pentagon's Revolving Door
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
by William Fisher
The Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America – but
is known to have spied on at least 186 peaceful anti-war protests in the U.S. – has just awarded a $30 million contract to a company whose senior management includes the former Defense Department (DOD) official who set up that office.
The former DOD official is Dr. Stephen Cambone, a trusted protégé of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Since his resignation as DOD’s Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence following Rumsfeld’s departure in November 2006, Cambone has been vice president for strategy of a company known as QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America, a major British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia.
Two months after QinetiQ hired Cambone to expand its North American operations, that company’ s Mission Solutions Group signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, known as CIFA. While at the Pentagon, Cambone was responsible for supervising CIFA and was deeply involved in the Pentagon’s most controversial intelligence programs at a time when DOD was making concerted efforts to marginalize the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by setting up its own parallel intelligence apparatus.
Formerly known as Analex, QinetiQ’s new contract expands work that Analex was providing to CIFA since 2003. CIFA manages a database of what it regards as "suspicious incidents" in the U.S. The database includes intelligence, law enforcement, counterintelligence, and security reports, as well as raw non-validated information from DOD's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (TALON) reporting system of unfiltered information.
In 2006, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information request to inspect TALON’s documentation. It received and reviewed hundreds of TALON documents, among which was a 2006 memo listing 186 reports involving “anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S., several peaceful protesters identified as potential threats to the military, and 2,821 TALON reports relating to “U.S. person information” and “anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S.” These reports were entered into a DOD anti-terrorist threat database.
snip//
The bottom line: Rummie may be gone, but the Bush Administration and its army of private contractors continues to be chockablock with his private armies and neocon sycophants. And most of the departed are re-entering, and earning a ton more money in the process.
If you were hoping that Bob Gates was going to change all that, get over it.
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