" ... CACI had a contract with DOJ to help stop American citizens from getting access to geographic information and the related skills, jobs and equity. ... There are numerous reasons why the suppression of citizen access to government funded place based data is important to every American. ..."--
This was e-mailed to me a few years ago ...
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0405/S00014.htm
One day last year, while sitting through one of my depositions with the Department of Justice (DOJ), I was impressed by the extraordinary number of documents managed by the litigation support contractor. I asked the gracious young man doing the work who his employer was. He said he worked for CACI. That came as a bit of surprise.
In 1997, my former company, Hamilton Securities was building a software tool, Community Wizard, and related suite of tools. Community Wizard would help communities access information through the Internet about federal sources and uses of taxes, spending, credit and other resources in their neighborhood. The related suite of tools would help Hamilton analyze values of outstanding homebuilding, mortgage and other securities with street level data about communities.
Hamilton was an investor in a data servicing company, Edgewood Technology Services, in a residential community in Washington, DC. The notion was to prototype outsourcing growing taxpayer funded data servicing needs to American communities in a manner that would save money for the government, generate new jobs and skills in communities losing jobs as a result of globalization and generate profits for private real estate and pension fund investors.
At that time, CACI was the leading provider of geographic information systems and data to the federal government. Hamilton was a CACI customer. Richard Armitage, now Deputy Secretary of State was on the CACI board along with numerous board members with decades of experience working in the military and intelligence agencies.
Community Wizard is no more. It was destroyed ˆas a practical matter --by what appears to be the combined effort of the National Security Council, the Department of Justice Office of Attorney General and Civil Division, the D.C. US Attorneys Office and the HUD Inspector General Office with the help of a government informant, numerous members of the D.C. bar and the federal judiciary. The complicity of the judiciary was quite damaging -- particularly the actions of former CIA General Counsel, Judge Stanley Sporkin. If you start to research Iran Contra narcotics trafficking and financial fraud allegations, Stanley Sporkin and Richard Armitage's names often surface.
Judge Sporkin ordered our digital files seized and held under court control under false pretext for many years in a process where I was not allowed to know who was accusing me and of what I was accused. Sporkin created a process where my company and I could be destroyed without an opportunity to know or address the accusations against us.
After nine years of managing their mess, imagine my delight at hearing that the company paid so much by taxpayers to collect and manage data on all of us was making money by providing litigation support to DOJ's efforts. In short, CACI had a contract with DOJ to help stop American citizens from getting access to geographic information and the related skills, jobs and equity.
There are numerous reasons why the suppression of citizen access to government funded place based data is important to every American. The most important is that transparency and accountability in government requires that citizens can easily understand in a timely way what is happening with the resources that we give to government. We need access to reliable information about government taxes, spending and credit that conforms to the world that we walk around in and understand. When we are in the dark about how government manages resources in the political jurisdictions in which we live and vote, our money can be stolen without our being able to see how and to stop it.
A combination of The National Security Act of 1947 and The CIA Act of 1949 have created a budget mechanism that allows the CIA to spend as much money as it wants „without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.‰ In short, the CIA has a way to fund anything ˆlegal or illegal ˆ behind the protection of national security law. Some refer to this as the „black budget.‰ As a financial matter, the black budget over the last half a century has grown widely out of control. As a political matter, the governance process used to manage the black budget has become the real government that runs America. It is a secret government with zero transparency and accountability.
If communities had tools like the ones that I was building, we could do something about illuminating and transforming the black budget in ways that are safe and practical in our every day livesˆ like creating jobs and businesses for ourselves and our neighbors and removing narcotics trafficking and the War on Drugs from targeting our children....
Last year, the State Department awarded a sole source contract for up to $500 million to CSC DynCorp to manage the police, judiciary and prisons in Iraq. Immediately prior to the contract award, DynCorp's visibility had been increased by litigation in the United States and the United Kingdom involving employees who had tried unsuccessfully to stop sex slave trafficking by DynCorp employees while working on government contracts, including a contract to provide police and enforcement services. One of the issues involved was the relative lawlessness of private contractors in war-torn areas who are not subject to the same laws and discipline as military personnel.
When questioned about the DynCorp award, Richard Armitage, retired CACI board member, now Deputy Secretary of State, wrote in a letter to Congressman Christopher H. Smith, „It is unfortunate that the actions of a very small number of individuals years ago overshadowed the honorable work of so many others...‰
While I was sitting in my DOJ deposition watching CACI profit from document production, I meditated on Armitage's standards of performance. My company, Hamilton Securities generated $2.2 billion of profits for the government. The government fired us on a pretext that a subcontractor had made a mistake that we had reported to the government long before. The government accused us of gross negligence constituting fraud although privately they admitted, and their expert witness confirmed, there were no damages. Indeed, we had generated far more profits on the sales in question for the government than the government had expected and we were under no contractual obligation to do so. The courts ruled in our favor -- there was no breach of the contract other than on the part of the government. However, DOJ refuses to pay us which means CACI is still profiting on the destruction of Hamilton.
As I sat in the deposition after nine years of being terrorized by DOJ, I thought, perhaps if my employee had been buying and selling children with the local mafia and using them as sex slaves instead of creating transparency, saving money for the FHA Fund at HUD and creating software skills and jobs in residential communities, the company would have kept it's contracts in the Clinton Administration and be wining sole source contracts with Mr. Bush's Administration today. After all, the Clinton and Bush families were partners during Iran Contra. Indeed, Iran Contra profits seemed to have financed more than a few careers of people who are good at stopping transparency....
LINKS FOR RICHARD ARMITAGE:
Letter from Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage
re: Award of Sole Source Contract to DynCorp to
Provide Police, Judiciary and Prisons in Iraq:
Click for big version
Richard Armitage Quietly Confirmed as
Deputy Secretary of State
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/politics/armitage_SS.html
Behind the Bushes
by Sam Smith
See Section on Richard Armitage
http://prorev.com/bush3.htm
