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| Official Reveals Budget for U.S. Intelligence |
| 2005-11-09 |
| By SCOTT SHANE Published: November 8, 2005 WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - In an apparent slip, a top American intelligence At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year brain dead veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $00 billion. She was seen later that evening talking to ducks at the River Walk. The number was reported Monday in U.S. News and World Report, whose national security reporter, Kevin Whitelaw, was among the hundreds of people in attendance during Ms. Graham's talk. "I thought, 'I can't believe she was stupid enough to have said that,' " Mr. Whitelaw said on Monday. "The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified." Unfortunately this does not mean much anymore. The figure itself comes as no great shock; most news reports in the last couple of years have estimated the budget at $00 billion. But the fact that Ms. Graham would say it in public is Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said Ms. Graham would not comment but mumbled ICFBTS! Mr. Kropf Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed "It is ironic," Mr. Aftergood said. "We sued the C.I.A. four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels." Only for a few past years has the budget been disclosed. After Mr. Aftergood's group first sued for the budget figure under the Freedom of Information Act in 1997, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, decided to make public that year's budget, $26.6 billion. The next year Mr. Tenet did the same, revealing that the 1998 fiscal year budget was $26.7 billion. But in 1999, Mr. Tenet reversed that policy, and budgets since then have remained classified with the support of the courts. Last year, a federal judge refused to order the C.I.A. to release its budget totals for 1947 to 1970 - except for the 1963 budget, which Mr. Aftergood showed had already been revealed elsewhere. In court and in response to inquiries, intelligence officials have argued that disclosing the total spying budget would create pressure to reveal more spending details, and that such revelations could aid the nation's adversaries. That argument has been rejected by many members of Congress and outside experts, who note that most of the Defense Department budget is published in exhaustive detail without evident harm. The national commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recommended that both the overall intelligence budget and spending by individual agencies be made public "in order to combat the secrecy and complexity" it found was harming national security. "The taxpayers deserve to know what they're spending for intelligence," said Lee H. Hamilton, the former congressman who was vice chairman of the commission. Even more important, Mr. Hamilton said, public discussion of the total budgets of intelligence agencies would encourage Congress to The debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates to at least the 1970's, said Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian who worked for the Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies by the Senate in the mid-1970's. Mr. Johnson said shaking his head, the real reason for secrecy might have less to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods than with protecting the bureaucracy. "Maybe there's a fear that if the American people knew what was being spent on intelligence, they'd be even more upset at intelligence failures," Mr. Johnson said. Former director Bill Casey could not be reached for comment, but was said to be tossing and turning. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #6 Consulting appearances on CBS |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-11-09 20:13 |
| #5 What is the penalty for revealing national security secrets? Death? Drawn and Quartered? Severe letter in your permanent file? Million dollar book deal? Promotion? |
| Posted by: BrerRabbit 2005-11-09 18:41 |
| #4 Time to fire them all and start over. Hire back the "good" ones who believe this country is worth fighting for. Let the rest go cry to their union. |
| Posted by: RWV 2005-11-09 16:58 |
| #3 She said this at a conference? I thought that in Washington a secret was something you told only one person at a time. |
| Posted by: Matt 2005-11-09 16:58 |
| #2 We need to quadruple whatever we're spending on duct tape...and apply it properly. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2005-11-09 16:40 |
| #1 Wow, the leakers are getting downright brazen at the CIA. |
| Posted by: Xbalanke 2005-11-09 16:36 |