Air Force Clears Booz Allen re Snowden

[xiamiam]

The United States Air Force is saying defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is off the hook for the conduct of former employee Edward Snowden.

Snowden, 30, worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for only three months before he left his job in May and fled to Hong Kong. There he supplied journalists with sensitive government documents obtained using the security clearance that came with his position as a systems administrator with the firm.

On Wednesday this week, Reuters reported that Booz Allen Hamilton, or BAH, had been cleared of any wrongdoing by the Air Force.

"At this time ... there is no evidence that at the time of Mr. Snowden's misconduct, BAH knew or should have known, approved or acquiesced in Snowden's misconduct," a military official told the news agency.
more at link
http://rt.com/usa/air-force-booz-snowden-967/

that was fast

[Blackford]

1. Booz Allen Hamilton is critical to DOD and NSA operations

I'm not surprised it didn't take long to clear them of wrongdoing. They are so embedded in the military and national security infrastructure that it would take five years minimum to move all services inside the DOD/NSA from BAH and other big contractors.

To me, this is the single biggest hole in our national security infrastructure and really, maintaining and improving the national security infrastructure should be a core competency of these agencies and thus should never be outsourced.

[byeya]

5. I don't think cooks and scullions should have been outsourced from the military.

[Blackford]

6. What gets me is outsourcing combat missions from the military

The Blackwater nonsense was the worst possible thing to do both to the military and from a cost perspective to the pentagon.

There has never been a more moronic decision made than to hire mercenaries to do the job of soldiers in the United States military.

[byeya]

9. Agree with you 100% here

[Octafish]

7. That was Cheney.

As SecDef, Sneer put into play the privatization of profits from war.

Cheney's Multi-Million Dollar Revolving Door

News: As Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor -- whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.

By Robert Bryce
Mother Jones
August 2, 2000

EXCERPT...

In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.

After Bill Clinton's election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant -- which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company's largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.

Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company's help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/08/cheneys-multi-million-dollar-revolving-door

A real swell guy.

[Autumn]

2. But of course they would do that

So fucking transparent.

[byeya]

3. An Air Force Laff Riot.

I think there's still a law that could allow an administration to cancel the contracts of contractors who are guilty of a number of types of poor performance.
If so, this is their Get Out of Jail Free card.

[msongs]

4. well at least we have found SOMETHING transparent lol nt

[think]

8. Perhaps someone didn't want to miss out on a promising career....

How Booz Allen Made the Revolving Door Redundant
By Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Jun 17 2013 (IPS) - Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

~Snip~

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

~Snip~

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

~Snip~


Full article:

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/06/how-booz-allen-made-the-revolving-door-redundant/