The United Police State of America

I didn't know this and I don't find it at all comforting. Here are yet more members of the Bush "shadow cabinet." Welcome to the Ministries of Compliance and Thought Control.

Michaelis, who is the main point of contact for new interrogators, came to Lockheed in February after it acquired his former employer Sytex in a $462 million takeover. Sytex was founded 1988 by Sydney Martin, a management graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who dabbles in collecting old Danish and Irish coins. In its first year, the Pennsylvania-based company earned $1,500. By 2004, according to Congressional Quarterly, Sytex was providing "personnel and technology solutions to government customers including the Pentagon's Northern Command, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, and the Department of Homeland Security." Its revenues had reached $425 million.

The bottom line was undoubtedly improved by the boom in hiring contract interrogators that began just weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Armed with new Pentagon contracts, Michaelis advertised job openings for 120 new "intelligence analysts" ranging from Arab linguists to counterintelligence and information warfare specialists. The private contractors would work at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and at the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida.

I also didn't realize Lockheed had such a lock on the whole process.

The national security reporter for the New York Times explains how Lockheed gets its business: "Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and director of the national spy satellite agency."

"Giving one company this much power in matters of war and peace is as dangerous as it is undemocratic," says Bill Hartung, senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. "Lockheed Martin is now positioned to profit from every level of the war on terror from targeting to intervention, and from occupation to interrogation.

Contract interrogators? Rather frightening really and hardly seems to fit the definition of "free trade". Aren't its proponents always telling me how it opens up the market to competition? How ironic, as 10,000 protestors pointed out, that our Fearless Misleader is in Argentina right now - pitching a system we don't have at home.