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One American Who Isnt for Sale

By Robert Scheer

So its true, as filmmaker Michael Moore once warned us,the Carlyle Group is Big Brother. Thats the $176 billionprivate equity firm that once employed former PresidentGeorge H.W. Bush, his Secretary of State James A. BakerIII and a host of political luminaries that would put any

other list of Americas ruling elite to shame. Plenty ofDemocrats too, including former President Bill ClintonsChief of Staff Mack McLarty and Arthur Levitt, the manClinton appointed to head the SEC during the creation ofthe housing bust.

It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.,which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees,

whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know collectsand stores much of the governments immense PRISMdatabase spying on the lives of this nations citizenry.This is systematic snooping through the telephone andInternet records of hundreds of millions of Americansconducted by Snowden and others in Booz Allens employwho had the highest access to our most private personaldata while working at a for-profit company.

Our data is their commerce, and ever since 9/11,observing us has become mega lucrative. Booz AllenHamilton, The New York Times reported Sunday, hasbecome one of the largest and most profitablecorporations in the United States almost exclusively by

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serving a single client: the government of the UnitedStates. The word serving might be pushing it here,since 98 percent of the firms revenue of $5.8 billion lastyear came from the taxpayers, who are the same folks

being spied upon.

Heck, Booz Allen knows all about those taxpayers, sinceback in 1998, during the Clinton presidency, the firm washired to modernize the IRS. We made some verydramatic changes in the way the IRS is organized, BoozAllens CEO claimed at the time. How perfect: Make taxcollection more efficient and less painful, so the suckers

might not notice when you scoop up the loot at the otherend.

Of course, to those swinging through the revolving doorbetween the government and its defense contractors, itmust be difficult to draw a distinction between theirchanging roles. James R. Clapper, the chief intelligenceofficial in the Obama administration, who is now

investigating this security lapse, was himself a top BoozAllen executive. And it should be of little surprise thatJohn M. McConnell, currently vice chairman of Booz Allen,was previously the chief intelligence official in the GeorgeW. Bush administration. Its crony capitalism at itspatriotic best.

The national security apparatus has been more and

more privatized and turned over to contractors, DanielleBrian, executive director of the nonprofit Project onGovernment Oversight, told the Times. This issomething the public is largely unaware of, how morethan a million private contractors are cleared to handlehighly sensitive matters.

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Brian points out that the for-profit folks spying on us also get to granthigh level government security clearances. Those private sectoremployees are then entrusted to work in the most secretive sectors of thegovernments national security apparatus, including at the National

Security Agency. Its good work if you can get it. In January, theDefense Department granted Booz Allen a five-year, $5.6 billion dealassigning its private sector employees in key positions to advisePentagon personnel on crafting military policy. Maybe they can findsome new conventional wars to fight just in case the one againstterrorism loses its profitability.

That could happen now that the American public has been alerted to thefact that in the grand design of that war, it is the ordinary Americancitizen, even when shopping on the Internet, who gets to play enemy.That reality is what seems to have turned Snowden, like others beforehim, into a courageous whistle-blower. He signed up for training withthe Army Special Forces to go fight in Iraq because he bought the Bushadministrations line that it was a war to help free people fromoppression. That misplaced idealism collided with the observation thatMost of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs,not helping anyone, Snowden told the British newspaper The Guardian.

Still, he continued to serve the government, both with the CIA and thenat the NSA, where he worked as a Booz Allen contractor. There hewitnessed a part of the sordid story that he chose to share with his fellowAmericans. As he explained to The Guardian:

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almosteverything. ... If I wanted to see your emails or your wifes phone, all Ihave to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone

records, credit cards. I dont want to live in a society that does these sortof things. ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do andsay is recorded.

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The folks at Booz Allen, and its parent company the Carlyle Group, lovethat world as a fabulous profit center, and it is truly inspiring that thereare still folks like Snowden whom they cant buy.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/one-american-who-isn-t-sale-1371044701 . Allrights are reserved.

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