Tenet Refuses to Deny CIA Uses Journalism Cover–and Infiltrating American Groups

/32 Comments/in /by

There’s a whole lot more that came out in today’s document dump while I’ve been fighting about health care. Here are the set released in response to an EFF FOIA. As a number of outlets have reported, that set includes evidence the government was inappropriately surveilling domestic groups, including the Nation of Islam.

In the NYT’s story on the dump, there’s one more interesting bit: George Tenet refusing to issue a blanket denial that the US uses journalists as cover.

Among them was a letter written in 2002 by George J. Tenet, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, suggesting that a C.I.A. ban on using journalists as spies was not airtight.

After Islamic militants killed Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter whom they had falsely accused of working for the C.I.A., leaders of the American Society of Newspaper Editors asked Mr. Tenet to “declare unequivocally” that the agency’s spies never posed as journalists.

Mr. Tenet replied that for 25 years, the agency’s policy had been “that we do not use American journalists as agents or American news organizations for cover.” But he refused to make what he described as “a blanket statement that we would never use journalistic cover.”

Instead, he wrote, “the circumstances under which I would even consider any exception to this policy would have to be truly extraordinary.”

Note his emphasis on American journalistic outlets. Sounds like a giant loophole to me.

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32 replies
  1. readerOfTeaLeaves says:

    Can’t suss out how these things are related, but Dubai is going after Citigroup.

    The financial instability in Dubai must have some elements of intrigue; money from Iran, Israel, said to cycle through Dubai. So maybe it was simply a matter of time:
    — BUT IF Iranian oil revenues diminished in 2009, after the high oil price spikes of summer 2008 that preceded the fall 2008 economic implosion,
    — AND IF 80% of Iran’s government revenues come from oil, then their revenues and money sent to Dubai would diminish in 2009, then that lack of ‘liquidity’ from oil revenues could help contribute to a solvency problem in Dubai…. which now appears to be cycling back at Citigroup, Moebius-like.

    I’m not saying that’s what’s going on; just observing that this economic news is all rather weird, and must have ‘security’ implications at some levels.

    Meanwhile, if there’s a weird arms bust in Thailand… isn’t mercenary king Victor Bout** in Thailand? Wonder what’s up with that? (And while I’m dozing off to snooze over the keyboard, I hazily wonder… wouldn’t an arms bust in Thailand raise questions about whether BW had been rendering prisoners to Thailand? Could any of those arms had BW origins…? Is there something there that Erik the Dark Prince fears…?

    I don’t mean to send anyone down rabbit warrens wasting time.
    Just… Tenet clearly left the barn door open.

    And there are so many stories in need of courageous journos…

    ** Do I get another hubcap…?

    • emptywheel says:

      Yeah, Rayne and I were looking at that arms bust. Kazakhs on the plane too, so a Russian link isn’t out of the question. Maybe Bout is just running shop from his jail cell in Thailand?

      Do you have a link for the Citi stuff?

    • john in sacramento says:

      Meanwhile, if there’s a weird arms bust in Thailand… isn’t mercenary king Victor Bout** in Thailand? Wonder what’s up with that? (And while I’m dozing off to snooze over the keyboard, I hazily wonder… wouldn’t an arms bust in Thailand raise questions about whether BW had been rendering prisoners to Thailand? Could any of those arms had BW origins…? Is there something there that Erik the Dark Prince fears…?

      Possibly related

      U.S. to Probe China Cargo Plane Crash

      A Zimbabwe-registered cargo plane that crashed in flames on takeoff from Shanghai’s international airport, killing three American crew members, wasn’t carrying sensitive goods, a senior executive with the plane’s operator said.

      The McDonnell Douglas MD-11 freighter aircraft was carrying “general cargo, such as electronics,” and “nothing of any sensitive nature,” said Simon Clarke, chief operating officer of Zimbabwe-based Avient Ltd.

      […]

      Avient, whose Web site says it was founded in 1993, has drawn scrutiny in the past because of accusations that it has supplied weapons to conflicts in Africa. A United Nations report in 2002 said Avient had been involved in illegal actitivies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The British government later investigated the charges but didn’t find evidence supporting them. The company has since been accused of other illicit activities by think-tanks that investigate conflicts around the world.

      Mr. Clarke at Avient denied all accusations against the company. “We do not carry arms and ammunition,” he said.

      Avient said on its Web site that it operated the MD-11 and that “preliminary information indicates that the accident occurred on takeoff.”

      Mr. Clarke said the plane was a chartered freight flight carrying “general consumer goods such as electronics and clothes.” He said that, as with most cargo flights, the freight was arranged through brokers. He declined to name the company’s clients.

      […]

      • Gitcheegumee says:

        Hmm, wonder if there were any bags of dog food in that shipment of “general consumer goods”?

        Does anyone else recall BW hiding arms in dog food bags for shipment?

    • Gitcheegumee says:

      Feds: Arrests in Africa link al-Qaida and drugs‎ – 3 hours ago
      The arrests mark the first time US authorities have captured and charged al-Qaida suspects in a drug trafficking plot in Africa. …The Associated Press – 379 related articles »

      And the plot thickens….worth a look, Very interesting.

  2. bobschacht says:

    EW,
    Thanks for spotlighting this interesting issue. Journalists are a natural target for espionage, because a lot of what they do is what intelligence does– that is, research what is going on in trouble spots, build relationships with knowledgeable people, etc. The difference is that the CIA wants control over the information for its own uses, but journalists by definition have the goal of making at least some of their knowledge public.

    Let me suggest an ancient parallel: Kipling. The Brits were not unaware of the intelligence value of journalists. The 19th century Richard Burton, the translator of the Thousand and One Nights, was almost certainly an intelligence asset, as well as a well-known writer. And as the old Brit series, the Jewel in the Crown had it, IIRC, diplomats, military men, journalists, et al., were part of the colonial intelligentsia that mixed freely together in exotic places.

    There are quite a few of the ‘foreign correspondents’ on CNN, MSNBC and other cable TV networks, described as on-the-ground experts in certain areas of the world, whom I would bet had a variety of funding sources at some point in their careers, especially when they were freelancing, as opposed to on the company payroll. What’s the journalistic term of art? “Stringer”? This usually means the young no-names, before they get their first national exposure.

    Bob in AZ

    • Sara says:

      “Let me suggest an ancient parallel: Kipling. The Brits were not unaware of the intelligence value of journalists. The 19th century Richard Burton, the translator of the Thousand and One Nights, was almost certainly an intelligence asset, as well as a well-known writer. And as the old Brit series, the Jewel in the Crown had it, IIRC, diplomats, military men, journalists, et al., were part of the colonial intelligentsia that mixed freely together in exotic places.”

      Just finished reading an interesting spy tale, “The Irregulars” by Jennet Conant about a group of British Officers — mostly Royal Air Force pilots who had been wounded and disabled in the first months of the war, and were unable to continue flying, but were Handsome and Heroic and all, who were deployed in New York and Washington DC between 1939 and Pearl Harbor for the purposes of defeating American Isolationism and bending US policy toward support of the British. Principle means of accomplishing this aim apparently was screwing the wives of American Politicians and other opinion leaders. Fascinating tale in many respects, but the writer could have done so much more with the material at hand. The American Characters are mostly Journalists — Walter Lippmann, Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and others pepper the book along with the Texas Newspaper Millionaire Owner, Charles Marsh (married to Alice Glass who was LBJ’s Mistress), who was one of the young LBJ’s sponsors in DC. The book’s subject, Roald Dahl, (one of the disabled RAF Fighters) screws his way to influence by screwing Clara Booth Luce — and thus getting entre to the whole Time/Life set-up which was a font of isolationism for a time. Dahl is a semi-journalist — has mastered the art of the short story, and gains access to the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers for the purposes of putting the heroic British Cause forward. Once the US is in the war, then he is seconded to help organize OSS. Spends most of the rest of the war serving His Majesty’s cause by writing more short stories for the US popular media, screwing the Washington Ladies who have an interest and useful connections, and working with OSS. Dahl in fact worked directly for William Stephenson, (Intreped) who headed British intelligence/counterintelligence in the US. Post war Dahl became a successful children’s author.

      Just no way to seperate the intelligence gathering, the disinformation and information deployment, the Screwing and the Journalism in this saga. As I said above, I don’t particularly care for the writer’s style — something about the bloodless reluctance to ascribe any meaning to the content I suspect — but my point is the impossibility of dividing into isolated cells the work of the operative, in this case Roald Dahl.

      • emptywheel says:

        It was an interesting read, nevertheless.

        Now if all those kids reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory knew that Dahl was also a spook, it’d be rather interesting.

    • emptywheel says:

      Well, I’ve been following whether CIA is using journalists as cover since I did my series on Mahdi Obeidi. I’m pretty certain one, if not two, of the people involved were spooks, though possibly compartmented through Rendon Group. Those people were working out of a free-lance network (basically a website) set up in the UK, though it did move to the uS after the Iraq war started.

      And then we’ve had a number of journalists captured and accused of spying–including several who had a US and another affiliation. Plus the accusations that at least one of the two NYT journalists captured by the Taliban were spies.

      Obviously, it’s easy for those we’re hostile with to make these claims. BUt there is enough reason to believe we’re using journalism as a cover again that we should pause before doubting the claims.

  3. mattski says:

    I have heard of CIA men being mocked by members of other gov’t branches (esp. military) as fat loads who sit in foreign embassies and read the local newspapers. Fact is, journalists are in the intelligence business, but thankfully, mostly public intelligence.

    Speaking of Claire Boothe Luce, she’s a player in Gaeton Fonzi’s “The Last Investigation.” I highly recommend that book, especially in combination with Anthony Summer’s “Not In Your Lifetime.” There is (still) a festering boil weighing on our collective psyche, yet to be lanced.

    Dallas, 1963.

    • Minnesotachuck says:

      There is (still) a festering boil weighing on our collective psyche, yet to be lanced.

      That’s for sure! A read of James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable early this year launched me into an immersion into assassination lore that is still continuing. (At the time I was in the process of being drafted into the Army and when I finally had some time to myself life was happening, and continued to do so for 45+ years until semi-retirement.) Like most people who hadn’t paid much attention I had assumed that the conspiracy whispers were just the rumblings of paranoid deadenders. But when you get into it, and particularly when you chase down some of the references and verify their legitimacy and veracity, the circumstantial case becomes compelling that Oswald was far from the dim bulb, knee-jerk leftist, Cuba sympathizer the Warren Commission Report made him out to be, and that the WCR itself was a part of a massive government-wide cover up and disinformation effort designed to establish and reinforce the historical view of the assassination I held for those 45 years, along with the vast majority of other Americans.

      So far I’ve read Dick Russell’s massive tome about Richard C. Nagel’s role in the affair (The Man Who Knew Too Much), as well as Robert Morrow’s curious book Betrayal. Although this book is a partially fictionalized version of the events of the Kennedy presidency years, I found his accounts of the events he personally participated in as a contract CIA agent rang true. These included a clandestine flight into the boonies of Cuba during the night of the Bay of Pigs fiasco that verified that the Soviet’s were indeed building a missile control center, as well as his unwitting purchase of the rifles he believes were later used by those who really did kill JFK. Morrow’s later book about RFK’s death has considerably more information about the earlier killing. Although Morrow’s political views come through as at least as far right as Goldwater, he doesn’t hesitate to call out malfeasance wherever he sees it. In the RFK book he goes in some depth into Richard Nixon’s mob connections, which he writes went back to the origins of his political career. He also asserts that the US had hard intelligence as early as late 1960 that medium range nuclear missiles were being sent to Cuba concealed in Soviet oil tankers, were being installed in hardened underground silos, and that the Kennedy brothers were blowing off attempts to raise this issue by shooting (figuratively, as far as Morrow knows) the messengers. As for Fonzi and Summers, they’re next on my list.

      • kindGSL says:

        The ‘Family’ plus the drug war and I don’t see how anybody can be surprised.

        I wanted to point you to this post where I loaded the comments with a discussion of our politics and it’s deep history,

        Glenn Beck Defends Founding Fathers’ Decision to Count African-Americans as Three-Fifths of a Person
        http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/144599/

        I am trying to get Borders Bookstore to include ‘Native American’ in it’s religion section because to do would acknowledge us as human. Legally we are not. Please check the link for the explanation. Thanks.

      • mattski says:

        I don’t know of any connection between GHWB & JFK’s death. If you have any reputable references you might provide them. The books I cited are scholarly, level-headed & imo beyond reproach.

        Otoh, David Atlee Phillips is a name that comes up.

  4. MadDog says:

    I’d love to think that one of these days Tenet will have one too many brewskis with someone credible from the 4th estate and spill all the beans.

    Charlie Savage or Dana Priest: Buy Georgie a couple and see what happens!

    In my dreams. *g*

  5. BoxTurtle says:

    someone credible from the 4th estate

    BushCo memebers are very careful to avoid the few such that still exist.

    The CIA would use war orphans as spies, if they thought they could get something useful. And sleep soundly. So I have no doubt that journalists are being used as such, some unwittingly, some not.

    Boxturtle (Judy, Judy, Judy)

  6. knowbuddhau says:

    Now this is exactly what I’m on about: jacking public opinion with carefully scripted myths is the state of the art in manufacturing consent.

    None other than the late great Joseph Campbell lectured for decades at the State Department on the power of myths. Obviously, his lessons have been taken to heart.

    Joseph Campbell Audio Collection Volume 4 Man and Myth Disc 4 The Necessity of Rites

    JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The old mythologies have to take care of this, they have to carry people from dependency through responsibility and being the one who’s carrying the universe, to somebody who isn’t wanted anymore. Well how did the old societies do it?

    They had a wonderful idea: old people are wise. [Laughter] So everybody made believe, you know? “And here they were asked–” [speaking ponderously]; they had the council of elders; the senate. The society always found a way to get the thing in, and I’ve been um connected, in one way or another, in a kind of, you know, talking way, with the State Department for a few years now, and the uh people down there tell me that one of their great problems is, not to do the things that the ambassador, and president and Cabinet, tell them to do.

    I can tell you, my dear friends [he chuckles], the State Department is a department of very learn-ed gentlemen, they know what to do. But they’re only agents. The directions come from these people who you know poured money into the Democratic Party for the election, and so become ambassador to this, ambassador to that, and they’re telling these people what to do, and I’ve heard it from many of them: “Our main problem is to achieve the work as slowly as possible in order to bring about as little damage as possible.”

    These are the authorities, the old people. We haven’t learned how to handle them, but in the old traditional societies, they had learned, and the reason they’d learned was that nothing much changed anyhow, things were in the times of the old people about as they had been in the times when they were young. That’s not true anymore.

    This was recorded just after Gerald Ford lost to Carter. Dick Cheney was his campaign manager.

    To the “learned gentlemen” at State, democracy is a problem. Messes up their careful plans.

    I suspect that Cheney’s gang, and others, have spent the last three decades learning how to handle the authorities.

    To do that, they rely on the power of myths, to jack electorates to hell and back, sticking them with the bill in every way. They’re blatantly jacking public opinion with carefully scripted myths, as Jane points out in this post: Landrieu Admits Public Option was All Just Senate Kabuki.

    For those who aren’t hip to the power of myths, Rachel Maddow had two segments on this last night.

    Health reform opponents resort to digital dirty tricks

    GOP unrestrained in health reform opposition

    The first features the work of propagandist Rick Berman and other astroturfers.

    The second segment features blatant use of weaponized mythology. First is a “prayer-cast” to stop health care reform. And then we see that C Street cult member Sam Brownback is listed just ahead of Lou Engle, who is shown preaching the apocalypse and then slipping in the politics. It’s an explicit use of the most powerful beliefs of a voting bloc to jack them to hell.

    From c. 4:40-5:10 in the “GOP unrestrained” segment, you can see Engle training his audience to become martyrs:

    “God, mark me now! Mark me! As a man and woman of the cross of Jesus Christ! Say ‘mark me!'”

    As one with a BA in psychology, I recognize those techniques. They’re based on studies that show getting someone to make a statement, even in favor of something they actually oppose, can change attitudes and thus behavior. With this propaganda, they’re making attacks, even suicidal ones, far more likely.

    This is why I say, jacking public opinion with carefully scripted myths is the state of the art in manufacturing consent.

    Scott Horton’s February, 2009 article still blows my mind:

    Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because “we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable.” Much like in Vietnam, “civilian policymakers and soldiers alike have cracked down on independent reporting from the battlefield” when the news has been unflattering, Curley said. “Top commanders have told me that if I stood and the AP stood by its journalistic principles, the AP and I would be ruined.”

    Answering questions from his audience of about 160 people, Curley said AP remains concerned about journalists’ detentions. He said most appear to occur when someone else, often a competitor, “trashes” the journalist. “There is a procedure that takes place which sounds an awful lot like torture to us,” Curley said. “If people agree to trash other people, they are freed. If they don’t immediately agree to trash other people, they are kept for some period of time–two or three weeks–and they are put through additional questioning.” His remarks came a day after an AP investigation disclosed that the Pentagon is spending at least $4.7 billion this year on “influence operations” and has more than 27,000 employees devoted to such activities. At the same time, Curley said, the military has grown more aggressive in withholding information and hindering reporters.

    The Associated Press’s special report on Pentagon “influence operations” can be read here. The Pentagon’s Public Affairs Office has been one of the last redoubts of the Neoconservatives. Burrowed Bush era figures remain in key positions in the office, which had responsibility for implementation of some of the Rumsfeld Pentagon’s most controversial strategies in which the American public was targeted with practices previously associated with battlefield psy-ops. [Emphasis added. Note that I updated the link to the AP report, the link in the original is broken.]

    BTW, lest anyone think only the Republicans could be so deceitful, the Dems use it, too. Obama’s West Point and Nobel speeches were chock full of myths designed to jack us into ever more war. “Lieberman did it” is another case in point.

  7. knowbuddhau says:

    Speaking of Horton, he’s just posted another example of the Holder DoJ attempting to jack the public with very carefully crafted myths:

    More Justice Department Chicanery in a State Secrets Case

    In prior administrations, a published leak was candidly acknowledged as putting an end to the claim of “state secrets.” The government might, of course, attempt to identify and bring charges against the leaker, but it would not persist in the counter-factual assertion that the purported “secrets” were still secret. Not so in the Shubert case, however. The Justice Department is making blanket (and totally incredible) denials that the publications of all the details are valid, and threatening the judge for even daring to read them. Here are the arguments of Justice Department lawyer Anthony Coppolino as reported in the Daily Journal (sub. req’d)(emphasis added), the leading newspaper of the California bar:

    On Tuesday, Coppolino said that having to litigate the case to prove that such “dragnet” surveillance did not occur would threaten national security and that the case should be dismissed based on the state secrets privilege. He issued a sort of warning to Walker, who has tried to proceed on only public information in another challenge to the Terrorist Surveillance Program. If Walker makes findings of fact based on information the government will not confirm or deny, Coppolino said, the judge himself gives certainty to terrorists about U.S. intelligence methods.

    “I can’t see why a judge would want to do that because of the harm that could result,” he said.

    Coppolino appears to be suggesting that if the judge even takes a look to see what sort of surveillance was going on, he’ll be aiding the enemy. This reeks of Dick Cheney off his meds, and it is a comment completely unworthy of a federal prosecutor.

    In his magisterial study, Political Justice, Otto Kirchheimer reviews the assault on the independence of the judiciary in wannabe authoritarian states in Europe between the wars. One of the first sure signs of authoritarianism was consistently a change in the relationship between prosecutors and judges…. [Bold emphasis added.]

    Reminds me of the Silberman opinion, and the steady stream of other myths issuing from Holder’s DoJ.

    And about that “change in relationship,” between us self-sovereign citizens and our erstwhile public servants–is it regulatory capture, writ large? A silent, but not bloodless, coup?

  8. maryo2 says:

    “the circumstances under which I would even consider any exception to this policy would have to be truly extraordinary.”

    And Cheney, with no oversight whatsoever, decided when a circumstance was extraordinary. For 8 years, anything that did not go his way was extraordinary. No rules applied at his (sociopathic) whim.

  9. Gitcheegumee says:

    Washington Post Could the ‘Gulfo’ supplant the dollar?‎ – 7 hours ago
    And if the Gulfo becomes the basis for oil contracts, some argue that in time it could even supplant the dollar as the world’s reserve currency (which …Management Today – 783 related articles »

    Gulf petro-powers to launch currency in latest threat to dollar …The Gulf states remain divided over the wisdom of anchoring their economies to the US dollar. The Gulf currency – dubbed “Gulfo” – is likely to track a …
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/Gulf-petro-powers-to-launch-currency-in-latest-threat-to-dollar-hegemony.html

  10. Gitcheegumee says:

    The Arab states of the Gulf region have agreed to launch a single currency modelled on the euro, hoping to blaze a trail towards a pan-Arab monetary union swelling to the ancient borders of the Ummayad Caliphate.

    “The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.
    The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.

    More at source
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk...

  11. bobschacht says:

    knowbuddhau @ 15:
    I hope that Walker either (1) pays no attention to Coppolino, or (2) pays attention to Coppolino in order to tear his argument to shreds– being careful, of course, to lay down the legal basis for tearing his argument to shreds, so as to leave Coppolino no recourse for appeal.

    Is Coppo a Bush holdover, or an Obama appointment?

    Bob in AZ

  12. Jeff Kaye says:

    Hmmm…. Not in 25 years, eh?

    2002-25 = 1977.

    It was in 1977 that Carl Bernstein published his landmark article in Rolling Stone on CIA use of American journalists and journalism outlets, including major radio/TV, Washington Post, NYT, etc. as operational assets.

    Here’s the link to “The CIA and the Media” at carlbernstein.com. Someone must have looked up that date for Tenet, or it’s burned upon their psyche.

    Oh, and I don’t believe George for one minute.

    [Joesph] Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.

    • mattski says:

      Bernstein’s words ring true. We also have to remember how the cold war effected (warped?) everyone’s thinking.

      It was cold war paranoia, imo, that motivated people high up in our intelligence apparatus to kill John Kennedy.

  13. SaltinWound says:

    Interesting that Bernstein wrote the article. I am inclined to believe the rumors that Woodward was associated with the CIA.

    • Jeff Kaye says:

      Don’t know about CIA, but Woodward did work in the Office of Naval Intelligence. It was in this capacity that he, by his own admission, met Mark Felt. More than that has been speculated, but being about intel, without hard facts, it’s hard to know what is spin, disinformation, fantasy, etc.

  14. bobschacht says:

    Jeff Kaye @22:

    “Most were less exalted:
    foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work;
    stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and,
    the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad.
    In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

    I think stringers and free-lancers are more interested in making a living than in “derring-do.” Many of those stringers and free-lancers are literally living on a shoe string, wondering how they’re going to get enough money for the travel ticket home. Under such financial pressure, a CIA contract would look rather tempting.

    Bob in AZ

  15. knowbuddhau says:

    Tenet said “we,” implying CIA wouldn’t. We know they’ve contracted out a lot of killing, what’s to stop them from contracting out the psy-ops? “We” don’t torture, either, or keep people out of sight of the Red Cross, or any of the things “we” stopped doing.

    Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

    Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.

    By Jeremy Scahill
    RebelReports
    December 17, 2009

    A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety. [Bold emphasis added.]

    • Gitcheegumee says:

      And the healthcare of these contractees is paid for by the US government through AIG and ACE insurance companies.

      Check these links out-especially the ProPublica one:

      Pentagon Study Proposes Overhaul of Defense Base Act to Cover Care …Sep 15, 2009 … Congress could save as much as $250 million a year through a sweeping overhaul of the controversial US system to care for civilian …
      http://www.propublica.org/…/pentagon-study-proposes-overhaul-of-defense-base-act-915 – Cached

      Defense Base Act – The US Department of Labor Home Pagewww.dol.gov/esa/owcp/dlhwc/lsdba.htm – Similar

      Defense Base Act – Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe Defense Base Act (DBA), 42 U.S.C. § 1651–1654, is an extension of the federal workers’ compensation program that covers …
      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Base_Act – Cached – Similar

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