Responding to a media request for comment on Stephen Aftergood's post, Intelligence Community Anticipates Budget Cuts:
“The US secret intelligence community is long overdue for a draconian reduction of its budget from the $80-90 billion a year today that it wastes on contractors producing vaporware, to something closer to the $20 billion a year that Jim Woolsey is on record as saying would be sufficient, and for once I agree with him.”
“General Tony Zinni is on record as saying that when he was in charge of the US Central Command, the secret intelligence community provided, ‘at best' 4% of what he needed to know. The fact is that the secret world is primarily a means of transferring wealth from taxpayers to corporations and banks–it not only lacks intelligence, it lacks integrity.”
“Two books sum up the sorry state of the secret world today–No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence, and Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.
“If we ever have an honest President and an honest Congress, I would be glad to replace Jim Clapper as Director of National Intelligence. I would first create the Open Source Agency as recommended by the 9/11 Commission, but under diplomatic auspices, and I would then begin a two track program to rescue America: track one would produce intelligence leading to a 50% cut in the US Government budget across the board (the 50% that is documented waste); track two would produce public intelligence in the public interest, setting the stage for the renaissance of moral citizen-centered capitalism.”
“My various books and articles support my recurring theme that intelligence should not be about secrets for the president or secrets collected but not processed; intelligence should be about decision-support for all elements of the US Republic, across all eight intelligence tribes: academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcment, media, military, and non-government or non-profit. Today we have a corrupt secret intelligence community inside a corrupt government inside a stupid inattentive society–less OWS, which has a ways to go and may lose the window for demanding Electoral Reform, the latter in my view the only demand that should and can be made and implemented in time for flushing the US Government down the toilet in November 2012.”
See Also:
2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated
2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (Full Text Online for Google Translate))
Review: The Innovator’s Manifesto – Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth
