TimShorrock.com

To all my readers, whether you’re a friend, colleague, comrade, fan of my book, intelligence officer, contractor or “government employee,” I hope you have a wonderful holiday and that 2009 brings you (and the rest of the world) some peace and prosperity!

Best wishes, Tim Shorrock

P.S. This picture was taken in Madrid, New Mexico. Madrid is an old mining town in the mountains north of Albuquerque, and has a fine tradition of lighting up for Christmas every year. During the 1950s, TWA airliners crossing the country used to fly low over the area so passengers could see the splendid display of lights and good cheer.

My latest, co-authored with Frank Naif, in today’s Huffington Post:

Any senior intelligence pick who has served in any capacity in government or as a private intelligence contractor during the past seven years is likely to evoke the kind of criticism that derailed Brennan’s prospects as a national intelligence chief. The inclusion of prominent intelligence contractors and senior officials involved with the policies against which Obama campaigned could fudge their judgment and tilt Obama towards decisions that are not in the nation’s best interests. Clearly, the intelligence community and its partners in the intelligence contracting industry and must remain under the closest scrutiny possible. Perhaps the incoming congress will exert a new interest in intelligence oversight and accountability - including the contractors that now eat up 70 percent of the intelligence budget.

Your’s truly is quoted in Rolling Stone, by the magazine’s political reporter Matt Tabibi.

Even stranger, however, is the fact that [John] Brennan used to head the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, or INSA, in independent nonprofit “research center” which is sort of like a chamber of commerce for intelligence contractors, although it claims it does not lobby. Tim Shorrock, a terrific reporter who has written a lot about the intelligence community, described the position of INSA chief as being like a “shadow intelligence director” and noted that prior to Brennan, current DNI Mike McConnell was chairman of INSA. What’s strange about this is that Obama would even think about picking a guy so close to the contracting community to run his intelligence operations. “Obama had been pretty critical of the whole contracting regime,” Shorrock told me. “So that was pretty odd.”

Sign posted outside of Rare Earth Gallery, Embudo, New Mexico, on the low road between Santa Fe and Taos, November 29, 2008.

Tiny Town, near Madrid, New Mexico, September 2008, along the Turquoise Trail from Albuquerque to Santa Fe.

On deadline, so light posting for the next few days. Meanwhile, follow me on Twitter. Among other developments: Simon & Schuster will publish SPIES FOR HIRE in paperback next May. It will include an epilogue detailing the latest updates on outsourced intelligence since my book came out last spring, including the ODNI’s recent confirmation of my 2007 scooplet that 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is spent on private contracts.  If you want the hardback now, you can always get in on Amazon.

In 1964, I was in eighth grade at the American School in Japan in Tokyo. Being the child of left-leaning missionaries and a recent visitor to Vietnam, I was pretty aware of what was going on in the world but mostly into teenage stuff: girls and rock & roll. One afternoon over the loudspeakers came the announcement that the “famous folk singer Pete Seeger” would appear that day in the auditorium. I had visions of some kind of cowboy like Burl Ives, and sat way in the back expecting another boring school-sponsored event.

But Seeger was nothing but: he leaped about with his banjo and 12-string guitar and sang of little boxes on hillsides, hobos on trains and civil rights. I started to listen carefully. And then he did something that changed my life. “There’s a young man in New York named Bob Dylan who’s writing the most amazing songs,” he said. “And here’s one of his best.”

With that, he launched into a twangy version of Dylan’s masterpiece, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Every line spoke to me, of war and apocalpyse and darkness. I’d never heard anything like it. I had to find out who this guy was writing this stuff. Soon I obtained every record Dylan had recorded up to that point (this was just before “Highway 61 Revisited” was released) and recorded them on my Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder. For the next few months, all I did was sit in my room and listen to those songs. I also picked up the guitar and began to play myself, and I’ve never looked back. To me, music and politics are forever intertwined.

I became a life-long fan of Pete Seeger, too. I’ll never, ever forget Pete at the November 15, 1969, March on Washington, 500,000 people streaming down the mall protesting the Vietnam War, and Pete singing over and over, at the top of his lungs: “All we are saying/is give peace a chance.” Pete’s still around, of course, and nearly 90 - and appeared this week on David Letterman singing a great new song about Martin Luther King. It’s a moving performance - one of the first times I’ve ever heard a Letterman audience sing along like this. Thanks, Dave, for bringing us this national treasure, and thanks Pete for being there all those years - and especially introducing me to Bob Dylan.

I’m a little tired of The Nation these days, and find much of its reporting simplistic, cliched and flat-out boring. Still, its commitment to progressive, left politics remains its primary focus, and in that sense it often speaks for me - including this recent editorial from editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and economic reporter Eric Schlosser. It echoes my deepest political sentiments about the current financial crisis in America: i.e., We need a new New Deal, and we need it now. Thank you to Katrina and Eric for explaining what this could mean in 2008 - and saying it directly (via the Wall Street Journal) to the capitalists who created this mess in the first place:

The size and scale of the Bush administration’s proposal are mind-boggling. During the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration spent about $250 billion (in today’s dollars) on public-works projects, building about 8,000 parks, 40,000 public buildings, 72,000 schools and 80,000 bridges. The entire cost of all the New Deal programs (in today’s dollars) was about $500 billion. The secretary of the Treasury now wants to spend perhaps twice that amount, simply to prevent a financial collapse.

Of course, something must be done–and quickly. “Government intervention is not only warranted,” President George W. Bush said last week. “It is essential.” With those nine words, he contradicted the governing philosophy of the Republican Party for the past thirty years.

According to President Roosevelt, the New Deal had three fundamental aims: relief, reform and reconstruction. On Wednesday night, President Bush described his far more expensive but far less inclusive spending plan as merely a “rescue effort.” Mr. Bush’s proposal–to hand over $700 billion to Wall Street banks without any Congressional oversight, without any means to prevent conflicts of interest, or without any measures to help ordinary Americans–was disgraceful.

Brilliant. Click here to read the full article.

Via Wired: Starting Tuesday, the latest music from Bob Dylan will be available on NPR. The album is Tell Tale Signs, another addition to his bootleg series of rare and unreleased recordings. Mississippi, the tune available on Wired, is a beautiful acoustic rendition of a song Dylan recorded (but didn’t release) on his great album Time Out of Mind. It was first released by Sheryl Crow on her Globe Sessions CD in 1998. “Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.” My sentiments exactly. For lots more on Bob, read Erik Anderson’s wonderful blog, Expecting Rain.

Meanwhile, take a listen to the great Hawaiian slack key guitarist Ledward Kaapana. Heard him play with 12-string master Mike Kaawa in San Francisco the other night and was blown away by their artistry and sense of humor. Catch them if they’re ever in your area.

And a few recent posts of interest:

• Chalmers Johnson on my book SPIES FOR HIRE and intelligence outsourcing in general (he prefers the term mercenaries)

• My podcast interview with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald

• And lest we forget, links to the atomic bomb museums in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (destroyed by the United States and August 9 and August 6, 1945).