Pentagon powers into the future

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php?sid=366629
snip...
As a result, according to Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, the Pentagon now controls more than 80% of US intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, "The Pentagon has been the big bureaucratic winner in all of this."

It is such a big winner that CIA director Michael Hayden now controls only the budget for the CIA itself - about $4 or 5 billion a year and no longer even gives the president his daily helping of intelligence.

The Pentagon's intelligence shadow looms large well beyond the corridors of Washington's bureaucracies. It stretches across the mountains of Afghanistan as well. After the US invaded that country in 2001, Rumsfeld recognized that, unless the Pentagon controlled information-gathering and took the lead in carrying out covert operations, it would remain dependent on - and therefore subordinate to - the CIA with its grasp of "on-the-ground" intelligence.

In one of his now infamous memos, labeled "snowflakes" by a staff that watched them regularly flutter down from on high, he asserted that, if the "war on terror" was going to stretch far into the future, he did not want to continue the Pentagon's "near total dependence on the CIA". And so Rumsfeld set up a new, directly competitive organization, the Pentagon's Strategic Support Branch, which put the intelligence-gathering components of the US Special Forces under one roof reporting directly to him. (Many in the intelligence community saw the office as illegitimate, but Rumsfeld was riding high and they were helpless to do anything.)

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Our military has turned into a dumping ground of corruption