June 19, 2013
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For
defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega
checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the
game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the
folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called
cyber warfare.
That’s
the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that
employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security
engineer whose revelation of Booz Allen’s enormously profitable and
pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firm’s profitability and
that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.
Booz
Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice
versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been
attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice.
A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about
which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently
warned us.
But
just when the good times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the
past, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on
giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect
world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as
our freedoms.
Just
ask New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller. Rising
to the defense of NSA snooping on a scale never before imagined in human
history, they warn us that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, we
would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this
trade-off.
“I
believe that if there is one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving
nuclear material—it could lead to the end of the open society as we know
it,” Friedman wrote in his June 11 column.
No
nation in history has ever possessed such an imbalance of military
superiority and the ability to ward off foreign threats without
sacrificing its core values. Never has this country been as vulnerable
to foreign attacks as when the founders approved our Constitution with
its Fourth Amendment and other protections of individual sovereignty
against an intrusive government. They did so out of the conviction that
individual freedom makes us stronger rather than weaker as a nation. In
short, they trusted in the essential wisdom of the people as opposed to
the pundits who deride it.
Defending Friedman’s column, Keller wrote Sunday:
“Tom’s
important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is
not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a
panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the
war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”
So
it’s the panicky public’s fault and not the ill-informed work of
establishment journalists like Friedman, who led the charge to war with
Iraq based on phony claims about terrorism.
Once
again, Friedman has a misplaced faith in the work of the intelligence
community. The NSA snooping was quite extensive before 9/11 and
certainly in full force prior to the Boston Marathon attack, but did not
prevent either event. Indeed, our much-vaunted spy agencies still have
not come up with an explanation of how 19 hijackers, 15 from our ally
Saudi Arabia, managed to legally enter this country and learn flying
skills while under our government’s watch.
Nor
have those intelligence agencies explained why the only three countries
that recognized the Taliban government sponsors of al-Qaida were that
same Saudi Arabia as well as our other friends in Pakistan and the
United Arab Emirates. For information on the UAE connection, the NSA
might check with its buddies at Booz Allen Hamilton.
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