Who profits from our new war? Inside NSA and private contractors’ secret plans [View all]

[kpete]

Who profits from our new war? Inside NSA and private contractors’ secret plans
A massive war operation is being waged to track and kill ISIS -- and it's a lot more than cruise missiles
TIM SHORROCK

.............

Under its terms, 21 companies, led by Booz Allen Hamilton, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will compete over the next five years to provide “fully integrated intelligence, security and information operations” in Afghanistan and “future contingency operations” around the world.

The NSA is best-known to Americans for its awesome power to spy on the electronic communications of governments and populations around the world. But it is also a critical part of the Pentagon chain of command, particularly during wartime, and collects most of its intercepted communications from a global web of listening posts and military intelligence units operated by INSCOM and the other armed services.

INSCOM, which was created in 1978, has been at the cusp of U.S. policy in the wars on terror from the initial campaign against the Taliban in the fall of 2001 to the latest war against ISIS. Much of the top-secret work under the new INSCOM contract will take place at NSA’s networks of listening posts, and will “support complex, classified, compartmented, and/or unique ground-based and airborne reconnaissance and electronic intelligence collection and production systems,” the Pentagon said.

“Army INSCOM supports NSA very heavily,” Tony Shaffer, a former Army intelligence officer, who worked at the command from 1991 to 1995, told Salon. While he was stationed in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, Shaffer said, “Every mission I ran outside the wire was pretty much supported by INSCOM, which is NSA’s ground collector.” Shaffer wrote about his experiences in the book “Operation Dark Heart.”



MORE HERE:
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/24/heres_who_profits_from_our_new_war_inside_nsa_and_an_army_of_private_contractors_plans/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
https://www.inscom.army.mil/Contracting/254/254_TO_0001_Alpha.pdf