Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs (Investigation to occur)

[Pirate Smile]

Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs
Contractors, many of them former employees, are doing sensitive work, such as handling agents. A review of the practice has been ordered.
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
September 17, 2006


WASHINGTON — At the National Counterterrorism Center — the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like Sept. 11 — more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers — nonagency employees who carry special-colored IDs.

Some of the work being outsourced is extremely sensitive. Abraxas Corp., a private company in McLean, Va., founded by a group of CIA veterans, devises "covers," or false identities, for an elite group of overseas case officers, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the arrangement.

Contractors also are turning up in increasing numbers in clandestine facilities around the world. At the CIA station in Islamabad, Pakistan, as many as three-quarters of those on hand since the Sept. 11 attacks have been contractors. In Baghdad, site of the agency's largest overseas presence, contractors have at times outnumbered full-time CIA employees, according to officials who have held senior positions in the station.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-contractors17sep17,0,3821049.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[bluedeminredstate]

1. No accountibility.

This is so fucked up. I imagine it costs a lot more for those contract workers to fill the positions than a career employee, and I betcha the companies are good GOP donors. Ya think?
I wonder if the agency has really suffered such a huge loss of applicants in the last few years, especially considering all the patriotic fervor after September 2001.
This has some illegal and financial angle to it, I'm sure.

[Acadia Blue]

3. Privatization means no accountability and corruptability and gouging

taxpayers. This is how republicans are stealing our government. By turning it over tho their incompetant piggy buddies.

[badgervan]

2. Constitutional?

How can someone outside of the government have top secret government clearance, which is needed to do their job properly? This sounds like a perfect storm of competing intel groups, all more concerned with who gets the credit than in protecting the United States. Typical of bush/cheney/rove: privatize everything. Drown government. Meanwhile, they are absolutely destroying our country from within. al queda? hell, bush is doing their work for them. effin' arrogant, ignorant, putz. If I were still in the military, I could not respect this imbecile as my commander in chief. I wonder how many in the service feel like this?

[Acadia Blue]

4. Probably many. This is very bad news. Everyday this pig does

more and more damage to our once great nation.

[gratuitous]

5. Gee, no way this could come around to bite us

After all, who could ever predict that a for-profit corporation would sell out to a higher bidder?

Oops, did I let the cat out of the bag?