Privatized Spying DOMINATES the Surveillance-Industrial Complex

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Booz Allen Hamilton: Far Worse Than Blackwater

Tommy Paine

Let's take another trip down the rabbit hole, shall we?

Lost in the Edward Snowden debate is a critical look at his former employer, the company doing the spying on Americans in the first place: Booz Allen Hamilton.

Booz Allen Hamilton is a government contractor, with 99% of its revenue coming from the US government. Not only does it receive money from the NSA, but also the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, US Marine Corps, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and ... the IRS. In addition, Booz Allen is heavily connected to the CIA.

Among the individuals involved in running the company, we have:

James Clapper - current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), head of NSA, the man who lied to Congress about the fact that NSA is actively spying on Americans, is a former executive

Private "Blackwater-type" Spy Agencies: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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Could the sprawling surveillance state enable government or its legion of private contractors to abuse their technology and spy upon domestic political targets or judges? This is not a far off possibility. Two years ago, a batch of stolen e-mails revealed a plot by a set of three defense contractors (Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal) to target activists, reporters, labor unions and political organizations. The plans— one concocted in concert with lawyers for the US Chamber of Commerce to sabotage left-leaning critics, like the Center for American Progress and the SEIU, and a separate proposal to "combat" WikiLeaks and its supporters, including Glenn Greenwald, on behalf of Bank of America— fell apart after reports of their existence were published online.


Read more from Lee Fang at The Nation.

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Blackwater Builds Foreign Mercenary Force in UAE

Editor's Note: What could possibly go wrong with rogue private forces being used as secret police of the crown?

Blackwater chopper - AFP File image

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The crown prince of Abu Dhabi has hired the founder of private security firm Blackwater Worldwide to set up an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the United Arab Emirates, the New York Times said Sunday.

The Times said it obtained documents that showed the unit being formed by Erik Prince's new company Reflex Responses with $529 million from the UAE would be used to thwart internal revolt, conduct special operations and defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from attack.

The newspaper said the decision to hire the contingent of foreign troops was taken before a wave of popular unrest spread across the Arab world in recent months, including to the UAE's Gulf neighbors Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

The UAE itself has seen no serious unrest. Most of its population is made up of foreign workers.

Blackwater, which once had lucrative contracts to protect U.S. officials in Iraq, became notorious in the region in 2007 when its guards opened fire in Baghdad traffic, killing at least 14 people in what the Iraqi government called a "massacre."

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Max Keiser war is the last Ponzi Scheme

This time Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, look at the scandals of security firms by day, terrorists by night and whether or not Erik Prince 'needs a break from America,' or broke America. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Paul McLeary, a journalist specializing in defense, intelligence and military, about the arms race in the Arctic.

More Troops Head to Iraq as Obama Declares Mission Accomplished

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
August 26, 2010

Iraq troop drawdown, what troop drawdown?

	War is over, if you want. A collapsed building is seen at the site of a bombing in Baghdad on Wednesday, August 25, 2010.

It was about a week ago the corporate media, with much sickening fanfare, announced the “official” end to the occupation of Iraq.

‘The last American combat troops left Iraq today, seven-and-a-half years after the US-led invasion, and two weeks ahead of President Barack Obama’s 31 August deadline for withdrawal from the country,” the Guardianreported on August 19.

“U.S. military officials are hustling to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to 50,000 to meet President Obama’s Aug. 31 deadline for an end to U.S. combat operations,” reported Fox News the same day.

NBC went so far on August 18 as to air what Brian Williams called an “official Pentagon announcement” — such candor is hardly surprising, considering NBC (formerly owned by death merchant General Electric) has unofficially read from Pentagon scripts for years — and showed images of “the last combat brigade in Iraq” (as the New York Times deemed it) hustling toward the Kuwait border, “symbolizing an end to fighting in the country.”

The supposed exit, of course, was all for show.

The Boston Globe added a caveat to the propaganda effort, maybe to confuse the American people, who are seriously weary of the occupation, especially as millions of them can no longer rationalize spending billions on it now that the economy is crumbling. “Given the human and material toll of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States has an obligation to continue helping Iraqis,” states a Globe editorial.

In other words, the troops ain’t going anywhere.

“After this month, 50,000 American troops will remain in Iraq to train the country’s security forces, protect Americans and US facilities, and conduct counter-terrorist operations — until they, too, are withdrawn a year from now,” added the Globe.

The above figure is misleading. The U.S. has over 100,00 contractors in Iraq. The number is admittedly down from just a few years ago when it was well over 180,000. Your average Iraqi, however, does not draw a distinction between a soldier and a contractor. Both are occupiers. Both are in his country illegally.

The U.S. didn’t build a fortress — officials like to call it an embassy — “the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq’s turbulent future,” as the Associated Press called it in 2006, because they plan to leave.

The U.S. has around 1,000 bases and military installations in 156 countries scattered around the world. The Pentagon does not plan to “drawdown” its presence in these countries anytime soon. In fact, it is continually looking for excuses to expand its presence.

It seems like the “insurgency” in Iraq has bad timing. Just as Obama and crew plan to get most of the troops out of Iraq, the bad guys strike.

“Insurgents launched more than two dozen attacks across Iraq on Wednesday, mainly targeting security personnel and killing at least 56 people just as the U.S. combat role is officially ending,” reports the Dallas Morning News. “In attacks in 14 towns and cities, from southernmost Basra to Mosul in the north, insurgents deployed their full arsenal: hit-and-run shootings, roadside mines and more than a dozen car bombs.”

Is it possible the insurgents are nostalgic for the invasion (death toll: over a million) and nearly a decade of occupation and want to give the U.S. an excuse to stick around?

Fresh food that lasts from enerhealthbotanicals (Ad)

Or maybe this “insurgency” is driven in large part by white guys.

“It had been long known to the Iraqis, to the Arabs, and to all Moslems in countries bordering Iraq that the majority of the terrorist attacks in Iraq, especially car bombing, are perpetrated by covert British, American, and Israeli operatives,” Dr. Elias Akleh wrote in 2005.

Akleh posted his article soon after two British SAS operatives were captured in Basra. “They were disguised by wigs and Arab dress. Iraqi sources reported that the Iraqi police were watching the two, and when they tried to approach them they shot two policemen and tried to escape the scene. The Iraqi police chased and captured them, to discover large amount of explosives planted in the car, which apparently was planned to be remotely detonated in the busy market of Basra,” writes Akleh.

Karzai: Private contractors ‘looting and stealing,’ working with terrorists

Daniel Tencer
Raw Story

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday defended his decision to ban private security contractors from operating in public in Afghanistan, saying many of the organizations tasked with providing security are engaging in terrorist activities, working with “Mafia-like” organizations and “looting and stealing from the Afghan people.”

Karzai also speculated that some groups may be acting as security contractors during the day and as terrorist groups “at nighttime.”

Last week, Karzai gave security contractors working in Afghanistanfour months to cease operations. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour on ABC’s This Week, the Afghan president said the move was necessary because the for-profit contractors were destabilizing the country’s fight against militants.

“We’ve decided to bring an end to the presence of these security companies who are running a parallel security structure to the Afghan government,” Karzai said, “who are not only causing corruption in this country, but who are looting and stealing from the Afghan people, who are causing a lot of harassment to our civilians, who we don’t know whether they are security companies in daytime and then some of them turn into terroristic groups at nighttime.”

Karzai argued that security contractors “are wasting billions of dollars in resources and they are definitely an obstruction, an impediment in a most serious manner, to the growth of Afghanistan’s security institutions, the police and army.”

Full article here