[NYTr] Bush's Spying Government

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Agencia Cubana de Noticias (ACN) - Nov 5, 2007
http://ainch.ain.cu/mailman/listinfo/ingles


Bush's Spying Government

By Angel Rodriguez Alvarez
AIN Special Service

Surely a normal American barely stops to think, much less investigate, 
how much their government spends spying on them and their family and 
sticking their noses into the affairs of other nations in the world. 
They do know of the existence of a powerful intelligence apparatus with 
the most modern equipments put at the disposition of some 180,000 
officials and specialists from different branches of the sector. This 
huge structure has spent over 53 billion dollars in this fiscal year 
alone, according to information revealed by Mike McConnell, new 
Director of National Intelligence. He points out that almost 44 billion 
dollars were consumed by the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Federal 
Bureau of Investigation, FBI and Intelligence and Defence Agency as 
well as other apparatus subordinate to the Pentagon. The remaining 10 
billion were used on internal control and in intelligence operations of 
the Armed Forces plus the spending in similar activities in Iraq and 
Afghanistan as part of the general defence budget. For obvious reasons, 
little is filtered to the public about such spending, a good part of 
which takes place undercover although due to its scope it is both 
difficult to hide or to unmask. The law establishes that the amount of 
funds added onto the budget for intelligence be made public without any 
breakdowns, 30 days after the end of the fiscal year, and from here the 
official information is offered now. On occasions officials in charge 
offer open information, with the objective of establishing a hostile 
policy towards a region or determined country. This what the "diplomat 
spy" John Negroponte did when, a time back, he was head of the National 
Intelligence Agency, did not lose a chance in creating and announcing a 
special office to re-enforce the search for politically sensitive 
economic and military information on Venezuela and Cuba. And now, 
although the press has almost ignored the appointment, the designation 
of Timothy Langford in charge of coordinating and collecting 
information on spying operations in both countries has been made known. 
Langford is not new.  He is a 48 year old career official with the CIA 
and is a graduate of Latin American studies at the University of Texas, 
in Austin.  He has dedicated two and a half decades of work on 
espionage in Latin America. Among his main tasks is the supervision of 
activities from the Cuban Interests Section in Havana and from Miami, 
through paid agents. One single element, among others, indicates the 
level of priority given to the task of Langford's team, it is working 
directly subordinate McConnell, the new director of National 
Intelligence.

If there is any coherence and rational existence in the work of the 
current administration it is related to espionage, officially 
established abroad over 60 years ago with the creation of the CIA, and 
currently legalized spying inside the country put into effect by the 
Patriot Act that authorized penetrating the privacy of US citizens in 
the name of preserving freedom. All of this clearly marks the current 
US government as a spying government.
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