medium | With the
rare glimpses we’ve been given behind the curtain of USIC opacity, we’ve
seen that US intelligence agencies don’t actually use their
surveillance capabilities for fighting terrorism nearly as much as they
pretend to. With WikiLeaks’ massive leak drop earlier this year on the
CIA’s sprawling surveillance system, there was no reference in any of
the documents to terrorists or extremists. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief
Julian Assange said in a press conference at the time that there was a “conspicuous” absence of any such references, adding the following:
“What is not there is any reference to terrorists, any reference to extremists. And that actually shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; no one no one who studies the intelligence world that’s a surprise to. Because even if you just look at the budgets that came out in 2013 to the US intelligence black-budget, you don’t see anything like the majority of the budget going towards extremism, even though there are very strong political reasons to try and couch any operation in countering terrorism and countering extremism to get more money.
Despite that political pressure, something like a third of the entire US intelligence budget is described as countering various forms of extremism. And the overwhelming majority is not, but particularly for the CIA, the vast majority of the expenditure and attack types are geopolitical. They’re about, you know similar to the information revealed about the CIA attacking of the French election cycle — understanding who could be pals with the CIA, who could help out the institution in one way or another. So for example, you spy on Airbus. That information you then pass to the US Chamber of Commerce amongst others, which is listed in the material, and US Chamber of Commerce can then adjust what is doing in order to assist Boeing, and these companies are closely connected to each other.”
So going by what we ordinary people can actually put our eyes on, surveillance
is not even really about fighting terrorism at all; it’s about having
access to as much information as possible which can be used for
geopolitical manipulation and leverage for America’s unelected power
establishment. And yet these intelligence agencies, which appear
to spend far less energy fighting terrorism than they pretend to, are
warning of terrorist attacks should the American people’s elected
representatives fail to grant them the reauthorization they demand.
