The Nation reports that the Bush administration is outsourcing most of the country’s intelligence gathering to private contractors:

Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in US government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.

Is this what Free Marketeers had in mind? Intelligence officers with loyalty to CEO’s and shareholders instead of their country?

The President’s Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the US government’s most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

It’s true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it’s impossible to distinguish their work from the government’s. Although the President’s Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.

Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.

This post was written by Mary Mancini