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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 8/12/15

Private Intelligence Contractors And Engineered Consent

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The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is a closed-loop system wired for aggressive warfare rather than defence and peace.

Evidence shows that "full spectrum dominance" [i] is the goal. Full spectrum dominance, as described by a U.S Department of Defense (DoD) news article, "means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations."

If the recent destruction and carnage caused by the US/NATO invasion of Libya,[ii] the illegal coup and carnage in Ukraine,[iii] the on-going warfare in Iraq,[iv] and now the invasion of Syria [v] are a measure of the expression "full spectrum dominance", then the DoD goal would more accurately be labelled "global military imperialism", or, as Michel Chossudovsky describes in two books: "The Globalization of War" and "The Globalization of Poverty". [vi]

The on-going pursuit of this goal is incompatible with the rule of law, and it is leaving a trail of carnage and misery throughout the world.

Clearly, given a choice, most people would prefer that tax dollars be spent domestically and for the common good. Consequently, the machinations of the MIC occur largely beneath the public radar of awareness.

A web of interlocked agencies serves to manipulate and then capture the public with a view to engineering consent for the toxic military agenda of global domination. Informed consent is increasingly negated while engineered consent is prevailing.

Private Intelligence Contractors (PICs) are an important component of the "perception management" branch of the machine.

Ostensibly, private intelligence contractors offer evidence-based "intelligence" that serves to inform policy-makers with a view to making sound decisions, but too often, these agencies manipulate intelligence for the benefit of a warmongering agenda, and an uninterrupted flow of lucrative, publicly-funded contracts.

Vested interests over-ride public interests at home and abroad, and the "War Machine", as described by Peter Dale Scott in his book, "American War Machine/Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan" [vii] metastizes, largely beneath the public radar, as it sows death and destruction throughout the world.

Science Application International Corporation (SAIC)[viii] is likely the largest (and least known) PIC, with a huge staff (about 40,000 in 2007, likely more now), and it is fully integrated into the War Machine.

Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele report in "Washington's $ Billion Shadow", that

"SAIC's friends in Washington are everywhere, and play on all sides; the connections are tightly interlocked. To cite just one example: Robert M. Gates, the new secretary of defense, whose confirmation hearings lasted all of a day, is a former member of SAIC's board of directors""[ix]

In the same article, Bartlett and Steele also report that

"SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission's deputy director for review a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC's sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA."

We now know that Washington chose to use these intelligence findings -- and not the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNMOVIC) findings [x] --as part of its rationale for waging the on-going war of aggression against Iraq.

The fact that SAICs board of directors is not only interlocked with Washington and governing agencies such as the DoD and Homeland Security but also with a myriad of powerful companies from the MIC, including Boeing, and Raytheon as examples,[xi] raises reasonable questions about its ability to provide "objective" intelligence.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author's website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this (more...)
 

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