Hot Shots: CIA Contractors Edition

The CIA and other intelligence agencies came under fire for hiring too many contractors, so what did they do? Hire more!

That and other nuggets have been dug up from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s biennial report by Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, who otherwise found the report sadly lacking in details.

The report revealed that “a written report on each covert action that is being carried out under a presidential finding is provided to the congressional committees every quarter.”

It also said the DNI “abruptly cancelled a multi-year effort to establish a single consolidated data center for the entire Intelligence Community a year or so ago, in favor of a migration to cloud computing.”

But the contractor issue was far more entertaining, in an inside-the-beltway kind of way.

“Under criticism that the number of intelligence contractor personnel has grown too high, too fast, intelligence agencies have been cutting the number of contractors they employ or converting contractors to government employees,” Aftergood wrote. “But some of those agencies have continued to hire additional contractors at the same time, resulting in net growth in the size of the intelligence contractor workforce.”

The report also offers new descriptions of the SSCI’s 6,000-page study  on CIA rendition,  detention and interrogation activities, broken down into three volumes, Aftergood reported:

José Rodriguez's Defense of CIA Torture Sounds Better in the Original German

With apologies to the late, great Molly Ivins, Jose´ Rodriguez’s defense of torture on on “60 Minutes” Sunday night sounds better in the original German.

Ivins, a legendary Texas journalistic crusader, once said the same about long ago Republican candidate Pat Buchanan's defense of right-wing "culture wars" against liberals.

But back to Rodriguez: Imagine a blonde-haired blue-eyed Nazi German general explaining in an interview -- regretfully, of course -- they had to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” on the Polish resistance.

“Zeh ver tretening us, killing German soldiers. Vat ver vee to do?”

Of course, there’s no “moral equivalency” between Polish guerrillas and al Qaeda's religious thugs. But declining to torture among other things, is what makes us different from Nazis.

Watch “60 Minutes” yourself. Make up your own mind.

But also note that one thing that’s constant in police states is the mentality of the generals and colonels who make the torture system run.

Here’s a take on Rodriguez from someone who watched him close-up from inside the CIA. It’s not flattering.