Inside the 2013 US Intelligence "Black Budget"

i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government's top secret budget. The $52.6 billion 'black budget' for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress."

Comments

Oversight

[Anonymous Coward]

If we are ever going to rein in our out of control government we desperately need to have all the public scrutiny we can get. Maybe even put some penalties up, say your budget gets slashed by a billion dollars every time one of your officials gets caught lying to congress or gets caught up in a scandal.

Re:Cool

[Camael]

Time to pretend like the president has any actual control over any of this! ...The presidency does not exist to wield power. The presidency exists to distract attention away from the wielding of power.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. Obama is apparently a a keen supporter of intelligence spending.

Jun. 2, 2009

When U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair met with President Barack Obama in February to discuss a proposed new constellation of multibillion-dollar imaging satellites, the resulting series of conversations was unusual and maybe unprecedented in the country's decades-long history of using orbiting cameras to spy inside foreign borders. ...

Obama's personal involvement in formulating a satellite acquisition proposal to Congress was "very unusual," said a retired intelligence official. U.S. presidents often receive briefings about spy satellite capabilities at times of crisis, the official said, but he did not know of another president being involved in acquisition planning. That is normally left to the intelligence community, which manages construction of spy satellites and operates them through the National Reconnaissance Office. Acquisition proposals are accepted indirectly by presidents when they sign off on their classified budget requests to Congress.

Well, since Obama was personally (and unusually) involved in formulating a satellite acquisition proposal to Congress, I'd say the argument that he is a mere figurehead doesn't quite fly.

Re:Cool

[BlueStrat]

This has been planned for the past 15 years now just like the Iraq war was. U.S. and Britain (primarily) won't miss their chance even though there is more evidence to counter the claim Assad used chemical weapons. They're manufacturing evidence.

The Elites need the Syrian pipeline and this is their chance to take it.

(Did I mention the U.S. and NATO have been funding the destabilization of Syria for the past four years?)

Next stop: Iran

You're close, but think bigger. Much bigger.

The global interests have decided that it's time for global change. They want the "Age of America" as a top superpower finished and over with. They want a major global power-shift.

The only way outside of natural disasters/pandemics that major and sudden global changes happen is through world war.

World War 3 is what is being staged here. Russia has already sent a fleet to the area. Both Russia and China have warned the US not to strike Syria. The US will be facing Russia, China, Iran, and much of the Middle East and others with an over-extended and exhausted US military. The US doesn't come out of that well.

The US Dollar is about to collapse. They've been running the printing presses at warp speed to maintain a rough status-quo while they make preparations. They see a war as not only the only way, but the preferred way, out of the somewhere-north-of ~$17T debt (that's admitted to), while simultaneously taking the US out of the top-global-superpower club and allowing martial law to be declared in the US and massive domestic political/societal changes made via the barrels of guns.

Hang on boys and girls.

Shit's about to get real after Obama strikes Syria.

I firmly believe it will be the "Archduke Ferdinand" moment that starts a world war and signals the end of the US as a top superpower, and the end of constitutional civil liberties as we've known them for the people in the US.

Strat