The booming corporate intelligence industry

A classic example of how the infotainment driven mass media keeps the American electorate ignorant of more important issues, was the prominence it gave the infotainment news story of a USDA career bureaucrat being forced to resign by the White House, while under reporting or ignoring the more important issue of the ever escalating privatization of national security by politically connected private corporations by reporters from the Washington Post.

While the Washington Post investigative report by Dana Priest and William Arkin is merely only a regurgitation of what several experts on national security have been writing about for the last 10 years, such as Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, or Pratap Chatterjee and his best selling book, Halliburton's Army, the failure of the main stream mass media to pick up on the story is the most fundemental reason why most politicans can support the perpetual state of war the country has reamined in since late 2001 and possibly since the end of the Cold War.

Political scientists suggest that about 20 percent of the U.S. public pays attention to international affairs and American foreign policy. This percentage closely matches the percentage of American citizens who own a passport and may explain why a majority of Americans do not understand the negative consequences of a nation in a semi permanent state of war and the continued pursuit of maintaining its hegemonic global position.

In case your news outlet was too busy reporting on the Mel Gibson or Lindsey Lohan story, here are some highlights of the article that is vastly more important to your family's well being and security. Perhaps after you read that the Secretary of Defense, who is in charge of protecting America from the next major terrorist attack, doesn't even know how many defense contrators are employed in his department, you may say that being ignorant about the true condition of our government is not such a bad thing.

No wonder why America never found Osama Bin Laden, the Pentagon can't even find its own ass.

1. Contractors are not supposed to perform what federal rules define as "inherently government functions," but they do. In every single intelligence agency, contractors are performing the same functions as federal employees, and often for higher pay. Contractors for the CIA "have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals."

2. Out of the 854,000 people who have top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. That's about a third of the total workforce in the nation's intelligence agencies. About 2,000 small to midsize private companies do top-secret work.

3. The booming corporate intelligence industry is siphoning off the most skilled workers from the government with better pay and shiny bonuses. Contractors can offer twice as much money to experienced federal employees as the government can, and at least one corporate executive was spotted recruiting in the CIA's cafeteria during working hours.

4. Hiring contractors is also really expensive for the government, despite the Bush administration's hopes it would be cheaper than hiring more federal employees. "Contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets," the Post says. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that federal workers are 25 percent cheaper than contractors.

5. The federal government doesn't know how many contractors are on the payroll, making it tough for them to scale down their numbers. "This is a terrible confession," Gates told the Post. "I can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense."