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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (262223)	6/8/2002 10:38:19 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

SCREW THE WEAK...... BUT KEEP IT SECRET MSI, Re: The basic policy is:" Screw the Weak"... The whole estate tax debate this week seemed almost surreal to me. The House was embroiled in a pseudo-controversy that won't have any impact until after 2010 while behind the magic curtain, who knows what kind of devilish deals were being cut? In the Senate, we found $4 Billion of pork added on to the domestic terror bill. Who knows what they were scheming to steal from us in the House last week? I'm sure we'll find out after the bill comes due. ************************************************* Here's some fun with math: prospect.org <Copy> Devil in the Details: Top Secret, Sometimes Issue Date: 6.17.02 In mid-May, under a front-page headline proclaiming, "Congress Moves to Lift Intelligence Spending," The Washington Post reported that the total budget for the CIA and Pentagon spy agencies had reached almost $35 billion. Among Beltway epistemologists this created quite a buzz. How did the Post know this figure? The government's total intelligence spending is supposed to be classified. Apparently, it's an open secret. As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists tells us, the budget -- while "definitely still secret" -- is "also relatively obvious." In fact, despite the best efforts of this most secretive administration, the classified part of the budget is hard to conceal. For one thing, you can reach a fairly accurate total by "reverse-engineering" the Pentagon budget: Just add up the enumerated unclassified expenditures and subtract that sum from the overall official budget. So why this fiction of secrecy? Indeed, in 1997 and 1998, the dollar amount of the total intelligence budget was declassified. In 1999, however, it was reclassified again, and remains so to this day. Presumably this keeps our enemies from sizing up our secret ops, so long as they can't add or subtract. But there may be other rationales for secrecy that we've only begun to plumb. Aftergood says that his organization "is currently suing over the 1947 intelligence budget total -- which the CIA says would damage national security if it were disclosed."** [[Good Morning, America!]] No wonder the CIA is under fire for failing to put two and two together in the months before 9-11. It was busy protecting us from Josef Stalin.