Re: U.S.-government organizations not combating threats because of greed (trigger warning: 9/11)
Added below so readers of my threat-analysis can access the information without having to scroll down 193 pages (the information is previewed/linked-to on page 44 of the 237-page pdf; online, the preview/link is in the section titled Re: PSing T2M via mAIP+).
ALL-TIME FUGLY precedent for U.S.-government organizations (USGOs) not acting on my T2M-analysis because of greed
From 2018 book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: How the NSA Failed to Protect America from the 9/11 Attacks:
[S]tarting in early summer of 2001, CounterTerror staff, managers, and even the director were worried that something terrible was coming. . . .
[U]nbeknownst to them, Al Qaeda had pushed back the date of their impending attack from July 4 to September 11. However, warning signs abounded that convinced the counterterror operators that something big was imminent.
. . . Like dominoes falling, events started cascading on top of each other throughout the month of August 2001.
. . . At the president’s ranch in Crawford, his CIA briefer Mike Morrell presented him the soon-to-be-infamous August 6 presidential daily briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
. . . On the afternoon of August 20, 2001, [NSA-er] Maureen Baginski asked Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe to her office. She explained that she was officially terminating their program ThinThread.
From 2019 book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, published by Penguin Random House:
“Trailblazer cost America more than money. ‘Trailblazer was the largest intelligence failure in the history of the NSA,’ Binney told me. ‘By killing ThinThread and going ahead with Trailblazer, the Agency traded the security of the nation in exchange for money.’
This assessment isn’t merely the sour grapes of a manager whose program lost out to a competitor in an office turf war. Tom Drake, who remained at the agency after Binney and the others retired, describes how, shortly after 9/11, he used ThinThread as a testbed to analyze information in the NSA databases from the weeks preceding the attacks. The program, he says, swiftly pinpointed each of the terrorists involved, their communications and movements before the hijackings and their dispersion patterns afterward.”
“ThinThread . . . had been built by a handful of NSA employees for a total cost of $3.2 million; in early 2001 it was largely complete, and had already been implemented in intelligence sites abroad. ThinThread was doomed by its own thrift, Binney says. ‘Six employees and $3.2 million? You can’t build an empire with that. How many contracts can you list? That’s why they had to kill us.’
. . . [In early 2001] Congress had enough confidence in ThinThread to direct the NSA to deploy it in eighteen test sites, and to allocate about $9.5 million for this purpose. A classified Pentagon report praised ThinThread’s data analysis capabilities, and directed that the program be implemented and enhanced. But launching ThinThread would show that the intelligence problem for which Trailblazer was being created had already been solved, Binney says, so the NSA slow-rolled ThinThread while proceeding with Trailblazer, for which he says Hayden had initially requested $3.8 billion and would eventually ask for even more.”
“In early 2001, Trailblazer was a sprawling, amorphous undertaking that in concrete terms was little more than PowerPoint presentations and big ideas, but it promised to engage large teams of contractor personnel and attract billions of dollars in funding. (Hayden, in his memoir, Playing to the Edge, called Trailblazer ‘more a venture capital fund than a single program.’)
. . . In August 2001, senior NSA management . . . pressed ahead with Trailblazer, awarding the prime contract for its development to SAIC, the company where [then NSA-ers] William Black and Sam Visner had both worked only months before. Trailblazer limped on for five more years. In 2003, having secured the valuable Trailblazer contract for his former employer, Sam Visner rotated back to SAIC, with a promotion to senior vice president of the company’s Intelligence, Security and Technology Group.
. . . By 2005, Michael Hayden admitted in congressional testimony that Trailblazer was badly over budget and behind schedule. In 2006, his signature program for the modernization of the National Security Agency was terminated, without ever having produced one piece of usable intelligence, at a loss to taxpayers that my sources have put at between $1.2 billion and $8 billion, though the total figure has never been made public.”
The author of Crisis of Conscience is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and National Geographic.
A 2015 documentary re: the above, executive-produced by Oliver Stone:
Re: USGOs not managing widely-known threats because of greed
From Crisis of Conscience:
“Hanford’s culture of impunity remains intact, because the would-be regulators at the DOE and the EPA, but also at the state and local levels, are part of the game, and look silently away as the billions roll into . . . the pockets of corrupt contractor millionaires and their government accomplices.”
“Leaking waste [that’s radioactive and deadly] is Hanford’s ongoing, slow-motion catastrophe, but other cataclysms could happen in seconds. According to a number of third-party expert reports, several decrepit structures holding large caches of radioactivity are susceptible to nuclear accidents which would threaten people across the Pacific Northwest.”
More re: USGOs not acting on my T2M-analysis because of greed
From said pdf:
Re: it’s too late to be stealthy/covert about preventing/subduing [PSing] Ps’ resistance
During October 2020 I abandoned my [2016-20] plan to have MPS [i.e., my planned startup] double as a front company (FC) for gathering (anticipatory) intelligence about people who are: 1) likely to be hypersexual (psychopathy correlates strongly with hypersexuality), 2) (becoming) wealthy (i.e., intel about people who are likeliest to (be) fund(ing)/lead(ing) Ps’ resistance). [IMPORTANT: My work on MPS-as-FC isn’t a key to PSing T2M today.] Keywords re: “abandoned”: my experiences since 2016 with government agencies in the U.S. (e.g., police departments, before* I learned that PDs employ many Ps [**]); seeming indicators that at least some Ps: 1) were aware of my FC work, 2) wanted to discourage me (e.g., in October 2020 [my emphasis] a parole officer came to my residence and asked to see me; I don’t have a criminal record); the willingness of U.S. intelligence agencies (IAs) to acknowledge/manage risks has been disincentivized via: 1) said [de facto] legalization of HF [huge fraud in the U.S.], 2) revolving doors between government and industry, 3) IAs are “effectively beyond oversight or control,” unless whistleblowers risk career damage/loss, imprisonment, etc. (i.e., IAs are IDEAL partners for companies seeking windfall$ via HF [HF-Cos]).
— Re: de facto legalization of HF in the U.S. —
From Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud:
“[H]ow hollow the edifice of American democracy has become, how insubstantial its checks and balances, after decades of self-interested chiseling, reaming, drilling and blasting by various experts and insiders . . .”
“[T]he sweeping redefinition of fraud as clever business that has occurred in our society . . .”
“[B]ig healthcare firms buy their way out of the frauds and crimes they’ve perpetrated . . .”
“Wall Street’s knowledge of its own impunity, proven in the aftermath of 2008, has devastated ethics in the finance industry. It explains the banks’ business-as-usual attitude to fraud, and their cost-of-doing-business approach to lawsuits and settlements.”
“[W]histleblowers are essential in national defense, because the factors that facilitate fraud—secrecy, the sense of mission and mystique, the culture of impunity, and the flow of Other People’s Money—are more extreme.”
“[T]he power of whistleblowers is often illusory . . . We are in the midst of a battle over whistleblowing, part of a larger struggle . . . between the rights of individuals to know what their corporations and their government are doing, and the ever greater power of organizations to keep their secrets. How these conflicts are resolved will say much about the future strength of our democracy.”
— Re: IAs are “effectively beyond oversight or control” —
From Crisis of Conscience:
The redacted version of the 2004 audit report, Eddington says, proves that the NSA is effectively beyond oversight or control, since by invoking Section 6 of the NSA Act of 1959, the agency is able to withhold anything having to do with personnel or operations. “That report shows how the NSA, a government agency which is supposed to be subject to independent audit by the DoD IG, can basically thwart transparency efforts to expose waste, fraud, abuse and criminal conduct . . .”
. . . Ultimately, Eddington blames Congress for accepting secrecy and lack of accountability among the intelligence agencies as well as the military . . .
— More re: many/most/all OSGOs focused on national security (NatSec-OSGOs) are, re: partnering with HF-Cos, effectively beyond oversight or control —
From a 2019 article by Matt Taibbi, published on RollingStone.com:
[A]n announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board . . . [has] essentially legalized secret national security spending.
From a different 2019 article by Matt Taibbi, published on RollingStone.com:
“[T]he Pentagon’s books [i.e., internal accounting systems] are so choked with bad data that discovering abuses in real time is virtually impossible. Compound that with decades of cuts to the Pentagon’s staff of criminal investigators and you have an open invitation to crime. Invoices could be systematically inflated for decades and no one would know. As Andy the Air Force accountant puts it, the system is ‘desensitized to fraud.’ ”
“It’s illegal for any government agency to spend money appropriated for one purpose on a different program. But the military—either hilariously or horribly, depending on your perspective—created a program that algorithmically produced such violations of the law.”
— Fugly implication of the previous two sections —
The prospect of (more) partner$hip$ between HF-Cos and NatSec-USGOs creates a powerful incentive for IAs et al. to ignore/suppress* threat-analyses that can’t yield huge, (nearly) risk-free** profits for HF-Cos (“legalized” HF undoes capitalism’s strong correlation between risk and reward/profit, of course).
* From 2017 book Warnings: How to Find Cassandras and Stop Catastrophes, co-authored by a former U.S. National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism (my emphases):
In many instances, however, it seemed that an expert or expert group, a Cassandra, had accurately predicted what would happen. They were often ignored . . .
. . . Warnings that have this potential to steal resources from less threatening projects tend to encounter institutional reluctance to tackle the issue. Audiences who react by rejecting an issue for these reasons tend to be the kind of decision makers who help to create Cassandra Events.
** Keywords re: seeking profit via working to neutralize Ps could be RISKY: personalized bioweapons, weaponized drones.
— Re: huge, (nearly) risk-free profits for HF-Cos that partner with NatSec-USGOs —
December 2019 articles in The Washington Post collected as “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War” indicate that the U.S.’s 20-year “war” was (mostly) an HF.
From the articles:
[S]enior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign . . . hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
. . . “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015.
. . . Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion . . .
From a 2019 article on the website of the Federation of American Scientists:
During the five year period from 2013-2017 . . . the Department of Defense entered into more than 15 million contracts with contractors who had been indicted [for], fined [for], and/or convicted of fraud, or who reached settlement agreements. The value of those contracts exceeded $334 billion, according to the . . . Report on Defense Contracting Fraud, DoD report to Congress, December 2018.
From “The Afghanistan Papers”:
The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.
In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers—allies of Washington—plundered with impunity.
History suggests that said power brokers were able to keep only a small fraction of the money they stole.
From 1993 book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI:
When OPEC raised the price of oil, the United States went along with it. It was an incredibly civilized thing to do, but privately we threatened them with the use of military force and a total embargo if the oil producers didn’t invest their oil dollars in Western banks and spend most of them on Western goods.
— Another indicator that NatSec-USGOs have-been/are IDEAL partners for HF-Cos —
From the 2018 article in U.S. News and World Report titled “The 10 Richest Counties in the U.S.”:
[H]alf of the top 10 fell in northern Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital . . .