Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Warning: Mercenaries at Work

[Note for TomDispatch readers: Part 2 of Pepe Escobar's RealNews.com TomDispatch interview is now posted. In it, Nick Turse discusses his new book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives about which Chalmers Johnson has said: "Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book… Nick Turse has produced a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon's pervasive influence in our lives." To read Part 1 of the interview, with Tom Engelhardt, click here.]

To offer a bit of context for Chalmers Johnson's latest post on the privatization of U.S. intelligence, it's important to know just how lucrative that intelligence "business" has become. According to the latest estimate, the cumulative 2009 intelligence budget for the 16 agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community will be more than $55 billion. However, it's possible that the real figure in the deeply classified budget may soar over $66 billion, which would mean that the U.S. budget for spooks has more than doubled in less than a decade. And as Robert Dreyfuss points out at his invaluable blog at the Nation, even more spectacularly (and wastefully), much of that money will end up in the hands of the "private contractors" who, by now, make up a mini intelligence-industrial complex of their own.