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Business Week has stumbled on the next terrorist target

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has been recruiting former military and government intelligence officers for a branch of its global security office aimed at identifying threats to the world's largest retailer, including from "suspect individuals and groups".

Via Steven Afterg0od at Secrecy News:   what Al Qaeda is planning to hit next.   Yes, it's WalMart, and the corporation intends to be well-prepared. 

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has been recruiting former military and government intelligence officers for a branch of its global security office aimed at identifying threats to the world's largest retailer, including from "suspect individuals and groups".

Wal-Mart's interest in intelligence operatives comes at a time when the retailer is defending itself against allegations by a fired security employee that it ran surveillance operations against targets including critics, dissident shareholders, employees and suppliers. Wal-Mart has denied any wrongdoing.

The jobs were listed with the Analytical Research Center, part of Wal-Mart's Global Security division, which is headed by former senior CIA and FBI senior officer Kenneth Senser. The analytical unit was created over the past year and half, according to published comments by its head, Army Special Operations veteran David Harrison.

The job description includes collecting information from "professional contacts" and public data to anticipate and assess threats stemming from "world events, regional/national security climates, and suspect individuals and groups."

"Familiarity with a broad spectrum of information resources and data-mining techniques" is listed among the skills sought, along with a foreign language, preferably Chinese or Spanish.

A Wal-Mart spokesman declined to comment on the Analytical Research Center for this story or to make any security executives available for interviews.

It's hard not to share Aftergood's concerns.

Steven Aftergood, who runs the government secrecy project for the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, said Wal-Mart's efforts appear to go beyond what most companies are doing, raising questions about corporate intelligence work outside of the oversight process in place for government spying.

"It's a troubling new departure in corporate security. We're not just talking about security, we're talking about intelligence operations," Aftergood said.

How close is the New York Times to saying the "I" word?

It struck me today, reading the New York Times editorial -- "Another Dubious Firing" -- about Rick Renzi & Department of Justice vs. Paul Charlton in Arizona. 

Yesterday, Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote to Mr. Gonzales to request all White House and Justice Department communications about the Renzi investigation. Given what has already come out, the burden is now on the Justice Department to show that Mr. Charlton’s firing was legitimate.

Congress stepped up this investigation in other ways yesterday. The House authorized immunity for Monica Goodling, a former Justice Department official who has invoked her right against self-incrimination. And the Senate approved a subpoena for Sara Taylor, a top aide to Karl Rove.

These interviews are important, but the major players need to testify. The Senate has approved subpoenas for Mr. Rove; for Harriet Miers, who was the White House counsel; and for other officials who seem deeply involved in the firings. It is time to serve them.

The Times, formerly the paper of Judith Miller and a complaisant editor, has been responsible for editorials lately which whittle away, not gently, at the bluster of the administration.  The volume has been turned up increasingly loudly in the past several months.  I wonder how long it will take the Times to use the "I" word with conviction.

Sado-porn and the Bush cowboy

Sidney Blumenthal has a great piece today at Salon, definitely worth watching one of those itless ads for! 

He leads us through Bush's choice of paintings for the White House and into the administration's obsession with the TV drama, "24".  The combination of kitsch, porn, and violence have marked this administration and have a background in the Reagan administration's wishful thinking.

"You are going to tell me what I want to know. It's just a question of how much you want it to hurt." Thus the lines between fact and fiction, reality and kitsch, and policy and entertainment are blurred.

The distance between the cowboy paintings Bush proudly displays in the Oval Office and the secret-agent torture porn that his administration officials not so secretly watch with envy reflects a yawning chasm in the sensibility of kitsch. Koerner's Western pictures depict an idealized past, where never is heard a discouraging word. At the Saturday Evening Post, he joined with Norman Rockwell to create the brush strokes of a warming nostalgia.

These enduring images infused Reaganism with its emotional culture. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been raised at the turn of the century in small-town Illinois and became a contract player in Hollywood's dream factory. Communicating kitsch was second nature to him. The perfect representation came in the TV commercial for his reelection campaign in 1984. As an American flag was raised in a small town, the voice-over intoned: "It's morning again in America." The past was present and all was right with the world.

Now, kitsch has been radically remade. No longer evoking nostalgic utopianism, kitsch releases the compulsions of fear. Under Bush, kitsch has been transformed from sentimentality into sadomasochism.

When you contribute to a political candidate, here's what happens

That's funny.  When I contribute to, say, the American Red Cross, I'm able to find out where my money goes.  The Red Cross is obliged to make that information available.  Not so when it comes to political campaigns.

With a record-shattering $150 million already raised by the presidential candidates, the 2008 election cycle is shaping up to be a Gilded Age for the political class. Whoever wins the White House, an elite group of ad-makers, strategists, pollsters, direct-mail mavens and fundraising arrangers will share the spoils of victory and the just as lucrative swag of defeat.

All this brings us to a dirty little secret of politics -- the murky financial arrangements between the top consultants and the campaigns they serve. The Federal Election Commission does not require detailed breakdowns of consultant expenses from the candidates. And the campaigns refuse to voluntarily release this information. The result is that political givers end up knowing far less about how wisely their money was spent than if they had donated the cash to a charity.

There's always another reason to kick 'em out

White House officials conducted 20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity, a White House spokesman and other administration officials said yesterday.

"Covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity."

The White House once again demonstrates that the Constitution doesn't and shouldn't be its guide.

Secrets about secrets

Apparently the private contractor disease has spread well into the US intelligence community where more and more Blackwater style contracting is going on.  Intelligence officials, concerned about the trend, did a survey to find out just how many were being used.   According to the New York Times today, now they know but they aren't telling.

Ronald P. Sanders, chief human capital officer for the director of national intelligence, said that because personnel numbers and agency budgets were classified, he could not reveal the contractor count...   

Mr. Sanders said the study did find that about 25 percent of the intelligence work now contracted out resulted from personnel ceilings imposed by Congress. But 25 percent of what, he said he could not disclose.

Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the decision not to reveal the numbers was a sign of dysfunctional policies. “It reveals how confused the government is about what is really sensitive and what is not,” Mr. Aftergood said. “What would Osama bin Laden do with the fraction of intelligence workers who are contractors? Absolutely nothing.”

The government’s use of contractors has accelerated greatly during the Bush administration. Nowhere has the increase been more striking than in the spy agencies, like Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence and National Security, whose budgets were cut sharply in the 1990s and then faced huge new demands after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

It's not as though the Bush administration isn't trying hard to feed "conspiracy theories" about its behaviors.  Let's just take this "need" for private intelligence contractors.  Work back to the beginning:  9/11.  It's hardly a half-step from "need" to justifiable policy made suddenly simple thanks to 9/11. 

I'd doubt my own intelligence if I were unable to imagine a connection between the policy goals of that mix of religious and ideological fanaticism with the corporate greed driving the Bush administration -- and the oddly convenient way in which four planes slipped past all detection and facilitated those goals on 9/11.