Bush Administration Outsourcing U.S. Intelligence Work
Guess it was only a matter of time. Can we really be surprised, considering this is the regime that has sold out our defense to private contractors, our port security to foreign government owned operations, our nation’s wealth to foreign creditors, etc… The privatization scam is reaching critical mass in absurdity.
“Once cleared, they can get a higher salary outside and they are gone,” the official said. “We’re leasing back our former employees.”
The phenomenon is partly the result of Congress’s approving large funding increases for intelligence activities but not increasing the limit on the number of full-time persons that agencies can hire. “We don’t have the billets,” the official said, so the surge is taken care of by contracting out the jobs.
Retired Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who ran Iraqi military training from 2003 to 2004, describes the hiring of civilians to do jobs previously done by the military as a “shell game” created by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to keep the “force strength static on paper.” In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Eaton wrote, “This tactic may help for a bit, but it will likely fall apart in the next budget cycle with those positions swiftly eliminated.”
“The Pentagon ramped up so fast, it had to turn to contract personnel to have continuity,” said another former senior intelligence official who now does contract work. He pointed out that some jobs are so complex, military personnel on three-year rotations are facing reassignment just as they master their jobs.
The trend toward contracting for intelligence analysts will hurt the ability of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to retain and keep high-quality people, said a former senior intelligence official who helped supervise the rebuilding of the CIA’s case officer and analyst corps. “It takes time to get the young up to snuff, and you need 10 to 20 years to get the value for that investment,” this former official said, asking for anonymity because of his past role in government.
Wonder if they even have to be American citizens?
