There's more, way more than hookers and Congressmen.
Just got finished posting this at Steve Clemons blog, Washington Note:
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?ent... Steve -
As is normally the case with matters involving covert operations that become embarassingly public, there are at least three layers to the NSA and CIA spy scandals, all of which prominently feature General Michael Hayden in various roles.
These cover stories are meant to mask the offensive odor of political espionage being conducted by GOP-allied contractors who have been privatizing NSA and CIA operations during the past six years,which coincides with Gen. Hayden's watch at NSA and the tenure of the Bush Administration.
The outer layer of the onion is the lie repeated by Administration spokesmen to the public -- essentially a denial that the NSA is spying on anyone other than al-Qaeda's international communications. The second cover story is the one which is available through open sources to better-informed consumers, such as intelligence beat journalists, bloggers, and middle-level intelligence community personnel -- that acknowledges the obvious fact that, as the Robb-Silberman Commission termed it, a "gross failure" of intelligence system occurred related to pre-Iraq war intelligence, and that certain, limited number of private contractors and officials (MZM and the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center)were the source of massive and pervasive "errors".
The middle cover story has some sex appeal, a scandal involving hookers and Congressmen and a corrupt defense-intel contractor, and the sudden resignation of the CIA's Nos. 1 and 3. The gist of that middle cover story is best captured by an old inside pages story with a bland headline in The Washington Post, in this case by Walter Pincus, "Intelligence Center, Contractor MZM on Cozy Terms"; Sunday, July 17, 2005; Page A07;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20... which portrays Gen. Hayden leading an emergency inter-agency investigation and repair effort. Finally, we come to the heart of the matter.
The inescapable fact -- and this is the "inner-secret" -- is that Hayden has been in charge of the transformation of NSA from a government spy agency tasked with monitoring threats from foreign states that uses technology provided by the private sector into a publicly-funded, privately operated domestic spy conglomerate whose primary mission is to suck up every byte of electronic data produced by every U.S. citizen so that it can analyzed by private corporations using highly classified proprietary algorithms that nobody except their owners, who are virtually uniformly GOP supporters, understand and utilize. After all that has happened to NSA on his watch since 2000, we are now supposed to just simply trust him to be neutral and objective as he takes over and transforms the human intelligence side at CIA.
No.
There's more. Please see,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/7/93933/90072 - Mark
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