The Neocon Intelligence Takeover

Here's an interesting juxtaposition.

The Associated Press is reporting that various members of the two Congressional Intelligence Committees - House and Senate - have a major problem with Gen. Michael Hayden becoming head of the CIA. The problem centers around military control of the intelligence community. (It already controls 80% of the budget.)

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich), Chair, House Committee: "the wrong person, the wrong place at the wrong time...I think putting a general in charge — regardless of how good Mike is — ... is going to send the wrong signal through the agency here in Washington but also to our agents in the field around the world."

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Senate Committee: You can't have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence...[The CIA] is a civilian agency and is meant to be a civilian agency."

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Senate Committee: "I think the fact that he is a part of the military today would be the major problem."

I have to admit they have a point - the last time a super-power let its civilian intelligence agency be run on military lines we called it the KGB.

Then there's the Washington Post that says

Congress is taking its first steps to oversee the Defense Department's rapidly growing activities in the foreign and domestic intelligence fields, focusing also on the growing practice of contracting out intelligence analysis to former military personnel.

The military intelligence apparatus is being packed with civilans employed by civilian companies while it is engaged in taking over the civilian intelligence agencies. These contractors, while former military people, are now civilians and the contractors involved are invariably those who personally cleave closest to the Republican neocon agenda.

The biggest involved is Lockheed Martin (provider of interrogators for Abu Graib and Gitmo and funder of John McCain) but others have included MZM Inc and now it's successor Athena Innovative Solutions Inc., still run by Michael Wade of Hookergate fame. The Center for Public Integrity illustrates just how lucrative MZM's contracts were ($125 million a year) and how well connected it's various officials are with the military machine. We are already getting an idea of how well connected they are with the GOP.

This juxtaposition isn't good news and it isn't about a feud between Negroponte and Rumsfeld or between a Negroponte/Rumsfeld axis and the CIA. The current round of Rightwing spin about such things - and even more ridiculous a cabal of liberals at the CIA who have betrayed Bush's America - are simply smokescreens. It is about the Bushite neocons packing every national intelligence arm with cronies and fellow-travellers. The secondary effect is that the corruption, graft and bribery we have so far seen will prove to be only the tip of the iceberg. The primary effect is to weld the various intelligence organistations into a whole, controlled by the neocons and run with an aggressive military operational standpoint uppermost in mind. And it will be so deep seated by 2008 that even should someone else inhabit the White House who wishes to return the CIA to civilian, non-neocon, leadership it will be next to impossible to disentangle it all - giving the next President an intelligence apparatus which will push the neocon agenda at him with no contrary intelligence voices in sight, inevitably effecting decision making.