Not Much of a Return on Investment
2007 Spying Said to Cost $50 Billion
Some Formerly Classified Figures Are to Be Disclosed Today
Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, October 30, 2007; Page A04
The director of national intelligence will disclose today that national intelligence activities amounting to roughly 80 percent of all U.S. intelligence spending for the year cost more than $40 billion, according to sources on Capitol Hill and inside the administration.
The disclosure means that when military spending is added, aggregate U.S. intelligence spending for fiscal 2007 exceeded $50 billion, according to these sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the total remains classified.
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If that's "shrinking government until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub," as Grover Norquist would have it, he'd better get a bigger bathtub.
$100,000.00 a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week--$6 million an hour and what do we have to show for it but misunderstood visions of a world we cannot properly comprehend? This explosion of money finds us occupying an American Embassy in Baghdad with three people who speak Arabic.
In the face of this constant money-pumping, Sibel Edmonds has not been allowed to tell you everything that she heard while serving as an FBI translator after 9/11 because she was gagged by the rarely-invoked "States Secret Privilege." (She's still gagged, the ACLU describing her as "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.")
This is value received for a national 'intelligence' expenditure of six million bucks an hour? The likes of Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Grover Norquist are so successfully making government (and the military) smaller, that they have tripled 231 years of national indebtedness in six short years.
Astounding!
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