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Spooks for hire

Heydon Prowse | 03.08.2009 17:13

A confidential 1525 page file of correspondence released to the public by political leaks site WikiLeaks provides some worrying insights into the privatisation of intelligence operations in the United States. The document comes from a US intelligence "fusion" centre used for data-sharing by a number of US law enforcement and military groups and includes the resumes of past intelligence officers.
 http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/power/spies-for-hire

More:  http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/power/spies-for-hire

Heydon Prowse
- e-mail: heydon@dontpaniconline.com
- Homepage: http://www.dontpaniconline.com

Comments

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Mostly harmless

03.08.2009 18:07

It's only polite to also provide a direct link to the wikileaks document rather than requiring people to read it through your site, although I personally will since you've made a hugely important point.

I just read my first 'spy' book, Richard Tomlinsons 2001 'Big Breach' and I highly recommend it. It shows the lengths the security services go to persecuting individuals simply to avoid something as mundane as an employment tribunal. It does touch on the porous relationships between corporations and security services, including state spies passing intelliegence directly to corporations. You can download it here:  http://cryptome.org/tomlinson-mi6.htm

More relevantly, this is an extract for a speech Susan Burke gave to legal students which explains the CCR court case against CACI in more depth. The second paragraph explains how the profit motive of outsourced intelligence companies led to false and damaging intelligence:

"
We are in for a lengthy battle with these two corporations. Our lawsuit alleges that CACI and Titan are responsible for conspiring with others, including government officials. We believe the corporations are not entitled to sovereign immunities because the United States’ official position remains, even today, that torture is illegal. Therefore, anyone in Iraq who colluded with these corporate actors was engaged in a criminal conspiracy, similar to the Mafia. We’ve employed the mob statute, RICO―the Racketeering statute. We’re saying that kidnapping, murder, and torture are criminal actions and that they have been done for economic gain. As I’ve gotten more into this issue, I’ve been fascinated with the whole issue of outsourcing, the use of private parties to perform some action that had previously been considered an inherently governmental function. I think it will be interesting to see how the courts resolve this issue.

Joe Margulies commented earlier that 9/11 has come to be viewed as an intelligence failure―and as a result we need to get more intelligence. I think that you can see this when you examine what happened in Abu Ghraib and other places in Iraq. Essentially, intelligence became the prize. In the days of Viet Nam, the body counts were the prize and just as people began to falsify the body counts, in this case, people began to make up “intelligence.” Torture makes people say what they think the torturers want to hear. As a result, translators and companies engaged in interrogation record and report this information and create more so-called “intelligence.” These reports create more profits for your company because the more of these reports you generate, the more work you’re given. There is an entire corporate profit motive in the torture, which is simply something that hasn’t fully come to the public’s attention. Do you really want to have people who don’t have their allegiance to the U.S. government, but rather to a corporate interests, be the ones deciding what goes in an intelligent report? Mind you, it is important to remember that all of these corporate people have the ability to walk off the job whenever they feel like it because they are not part of the military structure. This issue of outsourcing intelligence gathering has actually led us to have some strange bedfellows. A lot of military intelligence experts have been supportive of our efforts and have provided us with affidavits on why interrogation is an inherently governmental function.
We have just been through a lengthy fight over venue that finally concluded with us before Judge Robertson in D.C. The litigation is now in the motion-to-dismiss stage, where these companies say that despite making millions off of this, they nonetheless should stand in the shoes of the government and be given sovereign immunity. [CACI failed in this motion to dismiss] They do so by claiming that a judicially-created doctrine known as “the government contractor defense,” which emerged in a products liability context, should be extended to cover these human rights violations. That doctrine was announced by the Supreme Court in the Boyle decision, which states that if you are a weapons manufacturer and you’re selling weapons to the government, you are protected from tort liability if the products are produced in accordance with government specifications. For example, in Boyle, a helicopter had been produced by a private manufacturer under government specifications. The government had dictated how the ejection seat should work. Somebody got hurt and they sued the company that made it and the company said, “Well, wait a minute. We didn’t come up with these specs. We were under contract to the government. We just did what they told us to do.” Under that theory, since the government would be immune in that instance based on their desire to protect the public, it makes sense to have this judicial protection. You are allowed to stand in the shoes of the government, vis-à- vis state tort suits premised on product design defects. This has some sensible ramifications; however, the government contractor defense cannot be applied in the Iraq context. These people are saying that since they have a contract to translate or contract to conduct interrogations, they should be immunized from the fact that they tortured people. Our response to that is, “Gee, show us that contract, where it’s written down that you were supposed to keep people naked, that you were supposed to beat them for three continuous days, that you were supposed to use electricity to obtain information, and then maybe you have something to talk about.” The contracts themselves here are really what are at issue. For CACI, those contracts have been set aside by the government because they were procured in an unlawful manner. We argue that they don’t even have a contract, let alone a contract that speaks to their conduct.
"

Danny