The Terrorism Industrial Complex a.k.a. “Top Secret America” may sound like tin foil hat conspiracy to some, but many of you will remember it as the name of an extensive investigation by the Washington Post, whose editors’ intro says: “[This] is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks… When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.”
Short of storming the Beltway, the American people may never learn just how much of their money has been pillaged, plundered and simply wasted in the name of “national security” since 9/11, but our research suggests it could easily be an amount that exceeds not only the billions in bailout bucks given to the Banksters since 2008 but the trillions paid to the War Profiteers since 2001. In fact, just as the money being squandered on militarily useless F-22 and F-35 fighter jets will probably exceed our $1.3 trillion federal deficit (see our previous reports), the often untraceable trillions poured into the post-9/11 “too big to fail”, “war on terrorism”, “homeland security” and “black ops” troughs by our corporate-owned politicians and well-lobbied bureaucrats might easily approximate our $15 trillion national debt.
One of the hundreds of “security contractors” feeding at those troughs is SAIC – formerly Science Applications International Corporation. Headquartered in McLean VA, SAIC is “a Fortune 500 scientific, engineering, and technology applications company working in national security, energy and the environment, critical infrastructure, and health”. The company’s 46,000+ employees serve the Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal government agencies. SAIC had revenue of $11.1 billion for its fiscal year 2010.
Since 1995 SAIC has contributed over $3.8 million to political campaigns, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with Barack Obama and John McCain being the top recipients. That amount is eclipsed by the more than $24 million they’ve invested in lobbying since 1997. And over that same period, SAIC’s penalties for federal contractor misconduct have far exceeded their pay-to-play payola: SAIC paid a $24.9 million settlement for rigging bids on General Services Administration (GSA) contracts, $5 million to the Air Force for false claims and defective pricing, and all told over $32 million for a dozen different instances of government fraud, ethics and other violations. Of course, all their penalties and payola combined is chump change compared to the more than $63 billion in defense, security and other federal contracts SAIC has bagged over the past ten years.
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