Team B, RPI, and Fascism

This article is guest blogged/written by John Fudjack. John has an excellent website up which allows you to research the Neo-Cons - The Rest of the PNAC Iceberg

Team B, RPI, and Fascism by John Fudjack

In the tradition of "Team B", intelligence work in recent years has been transferred from CIA employees to private contractors:

"[last month] ... a procurement executive from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence gave a PowerPoint presentation at a conference in Colorado and let slip a staggering statistic — private contracts now account for 70 percent of the intelligence budget". Source

Who are these contractors? In 2004 'Democracy Now!' reported that -

"the CIA has begun quietly funding federal research into surveillance of internet chat rooms as part of the so-called war on terror. Some of the research is being done at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.". Source

Putting 2 and 2 together, it is reasonable to surmise that among the private contractors who are receiving this massive infusion of funding coming from the intelligence budget will be technological schools like RPI. As the NY Times piece quoted above points out:

"As it happened, the dot-com bubble had burst shortly before 9/11, cutting loose a generation of technology entrepreneurs who, when the government came calling, were only too happy to start developing new data-mining algorithms and biometric identification programs. New startups began sprouting in the suburbs around Washington. The number of “contractor facilities” cleared by the National Security Agency grew from 41 in 2002 to 1,265 in 2006. It was a gold rush, a national security bubble."

The phenomenon that the Times piece is describing is not only a large-scale 'outsourcing' of intelligence work, it is a profound SYSTEMIC change of tremendous significance - nothing short of a complete privatization of intelligence that renders private corporations the lead players in what used to be government functions:

"...Two-thirds of the Department of Homeland Security’s senior officials and experts have departed for private industry. Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, worries that his agency has become 'a farm team for these
contractors.'” Source

This is a dream-come-true, I imagine, for George H.W. Bush, who in 1976 was the director of the CIA, and the architect of 'Team B'. And for the neocons who have returned to power in the administration of his son, George W. This, of course, includes Paul Wolfowitz, who was a member of Team B in 1976, and Dick Cheney, who has demonstrated a strong commitment to the privatization of the U.S. military.

When the word fascism came into use in Italy early in the twentieth century it was originally understood to mean, by definition, a system in which the government was, in essence, run by the private corporate sector. Mussolini said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Source