THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And do shareholders get annual reports when their company does cloak & dagger work for the US? These questions are neither asked nor answered in the WaPo article on the privatization of the Defense Intelligence Agency. What is clear is that the Intelligence community, that favorite of Poppy Bush, is being mangled and mauled by his idiot bastard child.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.

The proposed contracts, outlined in a recent early notice of the DIA's plans, reflect a continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government work to private contractors.

Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department, according to a congressional tally in June. Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks caught many of them unprepared to meet new demands with their existing workforce.

So they needed extra hands, an understandable response. The fly in the ointment ishow they got all those people.

The DIA's action comes a few months after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, acting under pressure from Congress, announced a program to cut the agency's hiring of outside contractors by at least 10 percent. The CIA's effort was partly provoked by managers' frustration that officials with security clearances were frequently resigning to earn higher pay with government contractors while performing the same work -- a phenomenon that led lawmakers to complain that intelligence contract work was wasting money....

...Many companies that provide contract workers to the CIA and Pentagon intelligence agencies are headed by former employees of those agencies. For example, Abraxas, which is run by a former CIA case officer, has hired -- and then contracted out to the government -- more than 100 former intelligence employees over the past six years.

So out of the secret $Billions spent on intelligence we now have to pay twice as much to the same people to do the same work and pay for the corporate administration and provide a healthy (to them) profit to the CEO's and shareholders of these companies. Most assuredly an idea whose time should never have come.