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.
