AUGUST 2007

the doremus file that presents new exaMPLES OF gEORGE bUSH'S fASCIST rEGIME:

Bush Aide Blocked Report

Global Health Draft In 2006 Rejected for Not Being Political

By Christopher Lee and Marc KaufmanWashington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 29, 2007; Page A01

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Richard H. Carmona, who commissioned the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example of the Bush administration's frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific documents a political twist. At a July 10 House committee hearing, Carmona did not cite Steiger by name or detail the report's contents and its implications for American public health.

Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was "called in and again admonished . . . via a senior official who said, 'You don't get it.' " He said a senior official told him that "this will be a political document, or it will not be released."

After a long struggle that pitted top scientific and medical experts inside and outside the government against Steiger and his political bosses, Carmona refused to make the requested changes, according to the officials. Carmona engaged in similar fights over other public health reports, including an unpublished report on prison health. A few days before the end of his term as the nation's senior medical officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.

Steiger did not return a phone call seeking his comment. But he said in a written statement released by an HHS spokesman Friday that the report contained information that was "often inaccurate or out-of-date and it lacked analysis and focus."

Steiger confirmed that he sharply disagreed with Carmona on the issue of how much the report should promote Bush administration policies. "A document meant to educate the American public about health as a global challenge and urge them to action should at least let Americans know what their generosity is already doing in helping to solve those challenges," Steiger said in the statement.

Steiger said that "political considerations" did not delay the report; "sloppy work, poor analysis, and lack of scientific rigor did." Asked about the report's handling, an HHS spokeswoman said Friday that it is still "under development."

The draft report itself, in language linking public health problems with violence and other social ills, says "we cannot overstate . . . that problems in remote parts of the globe can no longer be ignored. Diseases that Americans once read about as affecting people in regions . . . most of us would never visit are now capable of reaching us directly. The hunger, disease, and death resulting from poor food and nutrition create social and political instability . . . and that instability may spread to other nations as people migrate to survive."

In 65 pages, the report charts trends in infectious and chronic disease; reviews efforts to curb AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; calls for the careful monitoring of public health to safeguard against bioterrorism; and explains the importance of proper nutrition, childhood immunizations and clean air and water, among other topics. Its underlying message is that disease and suffering do not respect political boundaries in an era of globalization and mass population movements.

The report was compiled by government and private public-health experts from various organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Catholic Medical Mission Board and several universities. Steiger's global health office provided the funding and staff to lead the effort because the surgeon general's office has no budget and few staff members of its own.

Bush Aide Blocked Report

"It covered all of the contemporary issues of public health, from environmental health through infectious disease transmission," said Jerrold M. Michael, a former assistant surgeon general and a former longtime dean of the University of Hawaii School of Public Health, who worked on the report.

A few of the issues it focuses on, such as AIDS treatment and research, have been public health priorities for the Bush administration. But others -- including ratifying the international tobacco treaty and making global health an element of U.S. foreign policy -- are more politically sensitive. The report calls on the administration to consider spending more money on global health improvement, for instance. And it warns that "the environmental conditions that poison our water and contaminate our air are not contained within national boundaries. . . . The use of pesticides is also of concern to health officials, scientists and government leaders around the world."

Three people involved in the preparation of an initial draft in 2005 said it received largely positive reviews from global health experts both inside and outside the government, prompting wide optimism that the report would be publicly released that year. The Commissioned Officers Association, a nonprofit group representing more than 7,000 current and retired officers of the U.S. Public Health Service, organized a global health summit in June 2005 in Philadelphia where Carmona was expected to unveil the report in a keynote address -- but he was not cleared to release it there.

Richard Walling, a former career official in the HHS global health office who oversaw the draft, said Steiger was the official who blocked its release. "Steiger always had his political hat on," he said. "I don't think public health was what his vision was. As far as the international office was concerned, it was a political office of the secretary. . . . What he was looking for, and in general what he was always looking for, was, 'How do we promote the policies and the programs of the administration?' This report didn't focus on that."

On June 30, 2006, a Steiger aide sent an e-mail saying that the report should not be cleared for public distribution: "While we believe the subject matter of the draft is important, we disagree with the style, tone and messaging," wrote the aide, Mark A. Abdoo, according to a copy of the e-mail. "We believe this document should be focused tightly on the Administration's major priorities in global health so the American public can understand better why these issues should be important to them. As such, the draft should be a policy statement, albeit one that is evidence based and draws on the best available science."

Steiger, 37, is a godson of former president George H.W. Bush and the son of a moderate Republican who represented Wisconsin in the House and hired a young Dick Cheney as an intern. The elder Bush appointed Steiger's mother to the Federal Trade Commission in 1989. A biographical sketch of her on the American Bar Association's Web site states that Steiger's parents, now deceased, were "lifelong friends" of many members of the same congressional class, including the Rumsfelds and the Bushes.

According to a résumé Steiger supplied to Congress, he obtained a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of California at Los Angeles before teaching at a university in the Philippines and consulting in Angola for the International Republican Institute -- a nonprofit group that is associated with the party and promotes democracy around the world. He was an education adviser to then-Gov. Tommy G. Thompson (R) of Wisconsin and came to Washington when Thompson became HHS secretary. He is now awaiting a Senate vote on his nomination as Bush's ambassador to Mozambique.

Bill Hall, an HHS spokesman, said Steiger promoted interest in global health at the department while more than doubling the number of expert staff members overseas and participating in international negotiations on issues such as avian influenza. "You have to look at his skills as an executive leader in spite of the fact that he doesn't have a medical degree or a public health degree," Hall said.

Public health advocates have accused Steiger of political meddling before. He briefly attained notoriety in 2004 by demanding changes in the language of an international report on obesity. The report was opposed by some U.S. food manufacturers and the sugar industry.

According to Walling and three other public health officials familiar with the current dispute, Carmona at one point suggested that Steiger release the global health report in tandem with a separate report of the sort Steiger wanted, but Steiger rejected the idea. An appeal by Carmona to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his staff produced no relief, a former HHS official said.

"I fought for my last year to try to get it out and couldn't get it past the initial vetting," Carmona testified earlier this month. "I refused to release it [with the requested changes] . . . because it would tarnish the office of the surgeon general when our colleagues saw us taking a political stand."

Thomas Novotny, a former assistant surgeon general who ran the global health office before Steiger, said, "It's embarrassing, just ridiculous that the report hasn't come out." Novotny, who served at HHS in the Clinton and in both Bush administrations, said that many nations have made health issues central to their foreign relations and trade policies, but that the United States has been reluctant to embrace that idea.

"It made perfect sense for the surgeon general to take up the issue because the U.S. used to be a leader in this field," Novotny said. "For the nation's top doctor to be unable to release the report shows that leadership is gone."

The global health document was one of several reports initiated by Carmona that top HHS officials suppressed because they disliked the reports' conclusions, according to a former administration official. Another was a "Call to Action on Corrections and Community Health." It says -- according to draft language obtained by The Post -- that the public has a large stake in the health of the 2 million men and women who are behind bars, and in the health care available to them in their communities after their release.

The report recommends enhanced health screenings for those arrested and their victims; better disease surveillance in prisons; and ready access to medical, mental health and substance abuse prevention services for those released.

But the report has been bottled up at HHS, said three public health experts who worked on it. John Miles, a consultant and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who helped draft it, said he suspects that the proposed health screenings and other recommendations are seen as a potentially burdensome cost. "Maybe they just don't feel it's a priority," Miles said.

Hall, the HHS spokesman, responded in a statement Friday that the Bush administration has always believed that public health policy should be rooted in science. "While we appreciate and respect Dr. Carmona's service as surgeon general, we disagree with his statements," Hall said.

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

ANOTHER SECTION OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS IN WHICH YOUNG MR STEIGER INTERFERES :
Facing a tangled bureaucracy and a lack of qualified staff, nearly half of the overseas jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled, according to the memo. At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008, Blount said. Among the causes he cited: Delays at a federal human resource center in Atlanta and an additional bureaucratic layer that requires CDC foreign postings be approved by a senior political appointee's office in Washington.

William Steiger, director of HHS' Office of Global Health Affairs, was out of the country and unavailable for comment, said spokesman Bill Hall. Steiger has come under fire in the past for allegedly micromanaging the overseas work of the department's scientific divisions. Steiger, the godson of former President George H.W. Bush, is President George W. Bush's nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to Mozambique.

Former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that morale problems and questions of scientific integrity at the agency pose a challenge to the centers' future role in U.S. public health."Science is nothing without people," said Dr. William Foege, who ran the CDC from 1977 until 1983, "and there's a perception now that politics trumps science and truth.""This is not just with FDA decisions or climate change or at EPA," he said. "We see this in public health as well."Citing an example of politics dictating CDC decisions, Foege said that in April 2004, the World Health Organization requested the participation of CDC scientists at a conference on HIV/AIDS, and the office of then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson insisted on clearing the participants in advance."CDC acquiesced in that, and politics trumped science in a way that I never thought would happen," Foege said.

CIA Outsourcing Intelligence: Author R.J. Hillhouse on How Key National Security Projects Are Contracted to Private Firms

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/26/1410253

Author R.J. Hillhouse caused a stir in Washington last month when she revealed more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms. Now Hillhouse has exposed private companies are heavily involved in the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document – the President's Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to itself or its clients into the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country's national security agenda. [includes rush transcript]

"Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the 'war on terror' have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today... the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show." Those are the opening lines to a recent article in the Washington Post by R.J Hillhouse, a blogger and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the nation's intelligence agencies.
According to Hillhouse more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Hillhouse's article in the Washington Post created a firestorm of controversy within the intelligence community. A week later the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded defending the use of private contractors.

Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document – the President's Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to itself or its clients into the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country's national security agenda.

R.J. Hillhouse joins us now in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

R.J. Hillhouse. Writes the national security blog <http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/> The Spy Who Billed Me. Her latest article "Outsourcing Intelligence" was posted on the Nation Magazine website this week. She is also the author of a new spy novel, "Outsourced."

JUAN GONZALEZ: “Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the ‘war on terror’ have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They’re about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. […] The private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show.”

Those are the opening lines to a recent article in the Washington Post by R.J. Hillhouse, a blogger and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the nation’s intelligence agencies. According to Hillhouse, more than 50% of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms, such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillhouse’s article in the Washington Post created a firestorm of controversy within the intelligence community. A week later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded, defending the use of private contractors.

Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document: the President’s Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to themselves or to their clients into the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country’s national security agenda.

R.J. Hillhouse joins us now from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has written extensively about outsourcing of the war on terror in her blog, thespywhobilledme.com. She has also just published a novel called Outsourced. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, R.J. Hillhouse. First, talk about this expose, what you found.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, what I found is, as you said, private corporations have completely penetrated the intelligence apparatus of the United States. It’s impossible -- even in the response to me by the Director of National Intelligence that was published in the Washington Post, they admitted that without private corporations they would be unable to function. So what we’re seeing is basic responsibilities of government have been handed over to the private sector, which I really don't have a problem with, but how it has occurred is very problematic. There are layers of responsibility that have been handed to private sector, so the government has actually very little control in some of what’s going on in terms of espionage. There’s management layers, and private corporations actually run other corporations that are doing espionage work, the entire gamut of everything from the NSA, what is being done in pattern analysis with phone calls. Internet traffic is handled by some private corporations. Actual gathering of intelligence on the ground, running of covert operations on behalf of the CIA, it’s all in private hands. It seems that James Bond bills by the hour.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you talk even about the presidential daily briefing. Could you explain how that has become privatized, as well?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, it’s not clear if the very final document is done by private corporations. It’s clear at every stage of the way, what’s called a government employee or blue badger will sign off on it. But all of the information that goes into it, the analytical products that become part of the President's Daily Brief, are produced by private corporations, because they're -- the work of analysts who receive their paychecks from corporations such as Booz Allen, Raytheon and others, is not distinguished from that of government employees. So that brings up a huge national security vulnerability, that one could very easily shape or nudge along US national security policy, because this is the most important national security document that we have in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how the President's Daily Brief works -- first how that intelligence is gathered and then how it’s presented to him.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: The intelligence is gathered by the sixteen different intelligence agencies by statute that make up the intelligence community. That would include the more familiar, CIA, the NSA, Defense Intelligence, some [inaudible] various intelligence agencies, the National Counterterrorism Center. And each of those, the analysts first are gather -- people gather the product or the intelligence. In some cases, things have been outsourced, like in the CIA the actual case officers are outsourced. They gather that intelligence. It goes to analysts.

In the case of the CIA, the Directorate of Intelligence, my acquaintances tell me that over half is run by private corporations or staffed -- the work force is staffed by private corporations with really analytical supervisors signing off on it. So they all gather the intelligence in the field, which much of that is gathered by private corporations in these sixteen different intelligence agencies, is put into analytical products that talk about what the major topics or issues are in the different regions. It’s funneled up to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which sifts through this and determines which are the most important pressing issues, and those are taken and put into the President's Daily Brief, which the Director of National Intelligence briefs the President on each day.

I mean, we’re all, I think, familiar with the President's Daily Brief, if nothing else, from that famous, I believe it was August 6th Daily Brief from 2001: Bin Laden determined to strike in the US. It’s meant to be able to give a heads-up to the President, to the very top of government officials, as to what the potential national security problems are that have to pay attention to that very day. And it’s quite chilling when one realizes that because there is no distinction between the work of private corporations, or the work of corporations -- some of these are publicly traded, but I say “private” to differentiate from the public sector -- the work of corporations and the work of government employees. And so, there is great potential to introduce things into the intelligence stream or simply to nudge things in a certain direction. I mean, there also would be the possibility of political manipulation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, given the possibility, obviously, that there are accountability issues and ethics issues involved by so much privatization of intelligence work, there would also seem to me to be intelligence issues, questions involved, security issues, in terms of how are these people vetted and also, at least within the agencies, like Central Intelligence, they have career employees who they can follow throughout decades sometimes in terms of their reliability. But how are these private contractors vetted?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: That’s an excellent point. At this stage of the game it’s not as frightening as what will happen over the next five and ten years. The people are vetted in the same way through the security backgrounds, on polygraphs, etc., as a government employee is. At this case most of them are former government employees that have gone over to the private sector. But the real danger occurs when -- and those people have been socialized and trained and been held in government yoke for twenty, thirty years, so it’s very unlikely that they would behave against the interest of the US government.

But then, of course, there’s this next generation of spies. What’s going to happen as corporations begin to raise their own case officers, train them in corporate values, rather than the values of public service? And at the same time, we’ve got hemorrhaging going on at the CIA, where over half of the employees of the CIA have been there for five years or less. So we have a situation where it’s really kids running the CIA. So we have a great deal of instability in the system. And as turnover occurs, as companies lose contracts, of course, people become unemployed, and that also is a great counterintelligence danger with what happens to down-on-their-luck spies.

AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, Ronald Sanders, Associate Director of National Intelligence, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote a letter of objection to the Washington Post about your July 8th Outlook article, “Private Spies: Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire.” He says it was “way off base. It suggested [that] the use of contract personnel by intelligence agencies [such as] the CIA is somehow damaging to national security.” He writes, “Quite the contrary -- we could not accomplish our intelligence missions without them. U.S. intelligence agencies were dramatically downsized in the 1990s, in some cases by as much as 40 percent. Whatever else their pre-Sept. 11 failings, our agencies simply [did not] have enough people to do the job.” Your response, R.J.?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, first, I would agree with him on most of that, because those were not -- that was not the point that I made, that the use of private contractors isn't the problem. The problem is how it’s been structured. It’s comes about very quickly and in a wartime situation, so it’s been cobbled together, and it’s a very fragile system, and that’s what I point to. I think many of these private companies are actually doing very good work, but what we need to see is that it’s done in a smarter way, where it’s a more accountable way.

And we need to look at everything that these corporations are doing and see, should that be a government employee or this should be a corporation, because what we’re looking at is entire branches of the CIA are farmed out to private corporations. So you'll see twenty, what they’re called, “green badgers,” or workers for a private corporation, reporting to a single blue badger, or government employee. And within the layers of green, there could be other companies that are reporting -- are part of that branch. So it’s multiple, multiple corporations reporting back to a single government employee, who most likely is a very junior person, because of the high level of turnover at the CIA. So, clearly, that one blue badger or employee is not going to know everything that’s going on. So there’s some real accountability issues and questions about the -- not just the scope, but the use of contractors. I mean, I completely agree that they couldn't do it without the contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does weapons of mass destruction fit into this, the lie that was spread? Do you see that as part of this picture or the result of this outsourcing?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, I wouldn't say it's a result of the outsourcing. Where I would fit WMDs in is simply a great example of the manipulation of intelligence that can occur when there is a political will to do so. And in this case, there was a formidable bureaucracy to prevent the manipulation of intelligence. I mean, much had to be put in place in order to use the bad intelligence from curveball to stovepipe everything up to the Office of the Vice President and to really do a workaround from the bureaucracy of the CIA that was trying, in many parts of it, to prevent manipulation of the intelligence.

But now what we see is, theoretically, it would be a lot easier to do something like the specter of weapons of mass destruction in another country, because corporations control the intelligence. They control the gathering of it. They control the intelligence in multiple different agencies, so suddenly you could have something being reported in the CIA the same time the NSA is picking up on it and perhaps the Military Intelligence Agency could be picking up. But with their current system, there would be no way to detect that it could actually be the same company that’s behind it, that’s feeding things into the intelligence stream. So that’s how I would tie weapons of mass destruction into it.

AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, we’re going to come back to you, but we’re going to break first. R.J. Hillhouse writes a national security blog, <http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/>thespywhobilledme.com. I want to ask about that PowerPoint presentation you got a hold of from the Office of National Intelligence and also ask about your book Outsourced, a novel. Stay with us.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. I’d like to ask you about your novel. In addition to all of the research that you do on intelligence, you have now produced this fictional account, Outsourced. Why fiction?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Because I found that there were things that could only be written about in fiction. It’s amazing for someone who has lived in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to find that in this country we’re in a similar place. In the repressive regimes, literature has often played the role of bringing things to light that could not otherwise be discussed. And I found that there are some things that are going on in the intelligence community or things that are going on with our government with relationships between corporate and government that it was only safe to discuss under the guise of fiction. So it’s an unusual transformation that a novelist would actually be ahead of media in this. I mean, it is the norm for me to be contacted each week by people from New York Times, Washington Post and others to try to learn about what’s going on in outsourcing. So it’s very strange as a novelist that I actually have moved ahead of that.

And I’ve not only been at the center of controversy in the intelligence community, I’ve also been in the center of controversy in the literary world, because I believe that and I’ve been very public about it, that thriller writers, that novelists, have failed us today. They haven't helped us understand the darker truths of what’s going on in the war on terror, the ambiguities, the changes that have occurred in how we’re fighting the war on terror and what that shows us about ourselves. Unfortunately, thriller writers have failed us. As you know, it’s mainly -- and I’ll call it for what it is -- beach reach that we see, that we don't see literature playing this larger role in society, but rather, the novels become a race of, we have to stop the terrorists from, what would be in a jargon, a, b, or c weapons -- atomic, biological or [chemical] weapons -- and it just -- it underscores the narrative of our time, which is, be afraid, be very afraid, and only a hero who will violate the Geneva Conventions, only a hero who will violate the Constitution will save us. So I tried to do something very different with Outsourced.

AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, you focus on Iraq -- you focus on Iraq and Uzbekistan in this novel, and also in this novel you say Osama bin Laden has been captured, but they’re just afraid to announce it for fear of terror attacks. Talk more about the core of this story, this fictional account.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: I believe that core of the story is left best left in Outsourced and in discussing it in the fictional account. I mean, I also deal with some other very hot issues that are best discussed only in fiction, such as black sites run by the CIA, the secret prisons. In Outsourced, those black sites have been privatized to private corporations. Private corporations are running the facilities’ management contracts. Private corporations are running the facilities’ security contract. So various things like that can only be discussed in fiction until the mainstream media gets its act together.

AMY GOODMAN: Back on the story that you have been breaking news with in the Washington Post and at The Nation, you recently obtained an Office of the Director of National Intelligence PowerPoint presentation that reveals that 70% of the US Intelligence budget is allocated to private contractors. 70%.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: It’s an absolutely stunning figure. It was actually the journalist Tim Shorrock that first found that PowerPoint presentation and the slide that showed the 70%. My contribution to it was recognizing that because, based of the information in it and in a hidden table in the presentation, it was possible to reverse-engineer the national intelligence budget, which appears that we’re really spending about $60 billion on intelligence each year, and out of that, $42 billion is going to private corporations. So what we see happening is the mainstream media has not been writing about this, has not been exploring it, but we’ve had a $42 billion industry come take over major responsibilities of government, when no one was noticing except a novelist. As I said, it’s quite a turn of events.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And from what you have been able to tell, the impact of all of the intelligence failures around 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction and the reorganization of the nation's intelligence agencies, what’s been the result of that?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, many of the changes have occurred in the intelligence agency. I’m not sure that they -- we could relate those directly to what’s occurred with outsourcing. And, of course, the manipulation of intelligence, that had nothing to do with private corporations, although, as I’ve pointed out, it would be possible to do that quite easily or much more easily now than before.

But what we’ve seen is the CIA and other parts of the national intelligence community failed us when it came to 9/11, and unfortunately, because of changes that have gone on in the last five years, those agencies are much, much weaker than they’ve ever been before. I mean, I would even question whether the CIA will survive another year, and if it does survive on the current trajectory, is it a CIA that we want to have, with, I mean, currently very high turnover rate? They’re in great denial with what’s going on. There have been some measures to try to stop it, but they’re half-measures at best. Over 50% of the people working there with less than five years experience, and this is a profession that it takes a -- there is a great long learning curve. And within the people that are 50%-or-less five-years experience, there’s high turnover among those, as well. And at the same time, you’ve got another half of the agency is outsourced to private corporations. So there’s some real questions of health of our intelligence apparatus, and it has definitely declined since 9/11. And those are some of the things that I look at fictionally in Outsourced.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for joining us. I want to thank Nesreen for being with us, coming up, the teacher who will be joining us, but I want to thank R.J. Hillhouse, who has written the new book called Outsourced, a novel, and has breaking stories on that issue, among them, "<http://mobile.thenation.com/docmobile.mhtml?i=20070730&s=hillhouse>Outsourcing Intelligence,” posted on The Nation magazine website.

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