Behind The Blackwater Debacle: The Shadow Of America's Top Spy

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http://cbs5.com/worldview/local_blogentry_276210237.html

Behind The Blackwater Debacle: The Shadow Of America's Top Spy
Frank Viviano
Oct 3, 2007 5:45 pm


Where does the buck stop? It’s a question that Washington has ignored through a long succession of scandals in Iraq, while senior offficials plead ignorance and the buck – responsibility – skids to a halt at grunt level.

It is the question we ought be asking today about the widespread and controversial use of mercenaries, known formally as “private contractors,” in war zones. And it should be directed squarely at Admiral J. “Mike” McConnell, the Bush Administration’s Director of National Intelligence.

Admiral McConnell is not simply the boss of sixteen separate U.S. intelligence and security agencies. In the netherworld where private security firms and public institutions do business, he was a principal architect of the system that led to the Blackwater USA disaster, with its revelations of trigger-happy hired gunmen shooting innocent civilians in the name of the State Department.

Privatizing Security

In 1996, when McConnell retired from government service after a 30-year career in the Navy and the National Security Agency (NSA), few critical tasks in intelligence or security were delegated to private companies. The NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency performed most of the former duties, while the military – the Marines, in the case of the State Department – handled the latter.

A decade later, half of an estimated $45 billion in annual U.S. intelligence outlays, along with an unspecified amount of the general security budget, pays for work “outsourced” to the private sector. The Washington Post reported last year that private contractors now make up more than 70 percent of a key Pentagon intelligence unit, as well as 50-60 percent of the workforce in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.

Up to 30,000 military contractors are currently in Iraq, part of an overall private employment force that is larger than the 160,000-strong conventional U.S. military presence there.

Blackwater, with its $1 billion in government receipts from 2001 to 2006, is the tip of an immense iceberg.

Where was Admiral McConnell in that decade of maxi-privatization?

He was senior vice-president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private security firm conveniently located near Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA. With an army-for-hire of some 10,000 operatives, it is in the vanguard of contractors that achieved unprecedented power (and profit) as sensitive national objectives were farmed out for cash.

More important, McConnell was also chairman of the board at the 1,500-member Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), an industry association that is the primary voice of private security and intelligence firms in Washington.

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