About SAIC from SAIC......A Commitment to "Ethical" Performance & "Integrity".....
Who in the hell is SAIC? Who in the hell is it's former chairman, J. Robert Beyster? For that matter, who in the hell is its current chairman, Kenneth C. Dalhberg? Well after some virtual footstepping and some practical considerations, my conclusions lead to the word, trouble. Big trouble! From Vanity Fair: "Nobody knows who they are," says Glenn Grossenbacher, a Texas lawyer who has battled SAIC in court on a whistle-blowing case. "Everybody knows Northrop Grumman and G.E., but if you went out on the street and asked who the top 10 [defense] contractors are, I can guarantee you that SAIC would not be one of them...... which is all the more remarkable in light of two developments. The first is a mounting collection of government audits and lawsuits brought by former employees for a variety of reasons, some of them personal and some coming under federal whistle-blower statutes. In a response to written queries, SAIC characterized itself as a highly ethical company and responsible government contractor, committed to doing the right thing."
"The second development is that several of SAIC's biggest projects have turned out to be colossal failures, failures that have occurred very much in public. But a review by Vanity Fair of thousands of pages of documents, including corporate e-mail messages, offers disturbing revelations about the company's inner workings, its culture, and its leadership"
Just after a brief look at its creator, J. Robert Beyster, we can draw some disturbing conclusions. On the outside, Beyster referred to his business as being based on intergrity, while behind the scenes he was allegedly yachting his "baby boys" around the San diego Bay, a pre-requisite to advancement on his SAIC managerial team.
Regardless of its creator and the implications, SAIC is a monster! It's the mother of all government contractors and yet no one ever hears much about them. Why? Especially when we look at current and past government projects(and blunders) they were directly involved in and also the funneling of billions of unaccountable tax dollars into projects (ranging from national intelligence to the proliferation of nuclear power) they suck up like an immense vacuum cleaner!
As for the blunders, we again quote the Vanity Fair article: "One involves the National Security Agency, America's intelligence-gathering "electronic ear" and for many years SAIC's biggest customer. The volume of telephone, e-mail, and other electronic communications that the N.S.A. intercepts worldwide is so massive that the agency urgently needs a new computer system to store it, sort it, and give it meaning—otherwise it will keep missing clues like the Arabic message "Tomorrow is zero hour," intercepted the day before 9/11 but not translated until the day after. SAIC won the initial $280 million, 26-month contract to design and create this system, called Trailblazer. Four years and more than a billion dollars later, the effort has been abandoned. General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. and now the director of the C.I.A., blamed the failure on "the fact we were trying to overachieve, we were throwing deep and we should have been throwing short passes." Happily for SAIC, it will get the chance for a comeback in the second half. The company has been awarded the contract for a revised Trailblazer program called ExecuteLocus. The contract is worth $361 million."
"Another failed effort involves the F.B.I., which paid SAIC $124 million to bring the bureau, whose computer systems are among the most primitive in American law enforcement, into at least the late 20th century. The lack of information-sharing is one reason why the F.B.I. failed to realize that in the year leading up to 9/11 two of the future hijackers—including one with known "jihadist connections"—were actually living in the San Diego home of an F.B.I. informant. SAIC set to work on a system called the Virtual Case File. V.C.F. was supposed to become a central repository of data (wiretap transcripts, criminal records, financial transactions) from which all F.B.I. agents could draw. Three years and a million lines of garbled computer code later, V.C.F. has been written off by a global publication for technology professionals as "the most highly publicized software failure in history." The failure was due in part to the bureau's ever shifting directives, which points up the perverse nature of government-by-contract. When the government makes unrealistic demands, the contractors go along anyway: They are being paid not to resist but to comply. If it turns out they can't deliver, new contracts will simply be drawn up. Responding to questions about the F.B.I. project, the company conceded that "there were areas in which SAIC made mistakes, particularly where we failed to adequately communicate our concerns about the way the contract was being managed."
The article continues: "These and other SAIC activities would seem to be ripe targets for scrutiny by the new Democratic Congress. But don't be surprised if you hear nothing at all: SAIC's friends in Washington are everywhere, and play on all sides; the connections are tightly interlocked. To cite just one example: Robert M. Gates, the new secretary of defense, whose confirmation hearings lasted all of a day, is a former member of SAIC's board of directors. In recent years the company has obviously made many missteps, and yet SAIC's influence in Washington seems only to grow, impervious to business setbacks or even to a stunning breach of security."
"Much to the embarrassment of a company entrusted with some of the nation's most precious secrets, its San Diego offices were mysteriously burgled in January of 2005. A censored San Diego police-department report reveals the basic outline. The report notes that the building "is patrolled by DOD certified security" and that "the interior lights are on motion sensors and would have been activated by the suspects." Nevertheless, burglars managed to break into SAIC's headquarters, pry open 13 private offices, and walk out with one desktop-computer hard drive and four laptops. By SAIC's account, the computers contained personal data on thousands of present and past employees, presumably including the company's many former CIA operatives, NSA executives, and Pentagon officials. To date the burglary remains unsolved."
The most chilling aspect of the article is the following: "SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national security state-the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism." In other words, SAIC represents a private business that has become a form of permanent government."
Private business as permanent government! Dare I suggest this has a major ring to Mussolini's corporatism? Add a perpetual war to the equation and a company who can't keep the padlocks on its top secret information and one can only ask, " How bad can it get?" Just read the entire article posted by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in March 2007 about SAIC and perhaps you'll begin to understand.
Washington's $8 Billion Shadow: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com
Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, a Fortune 500 Company, has been operating under the radar for a long time now. In media, it is nearly always overshadowed by its smaller (yes I said smaller) but viable cohorts, Halliburton and the Bectel corporation. Unlike the latter, SAIC is the "intellectual" rather than the "muscle" end of defense contracting. It's origins stem back as early as 1960, right after the advent of the military industrial complex and Eisenhower's chilly warning that we should be a "forever vigilant" and a "well educated" society, to check the potential dangers to democracy the MIC presented. SAIC, it seems, may well be one of, if not the greatest of dangers president Eisenhower warned us about.
SAIC's first government contract came from the Defense Atomic Support Agency, or the post war Manhatten Project. Indeed Beyster himself was involved in the original. "As Eisenhower spoke, a quietly ambitious man on the other side of the country, John Robert Beyster, was going about his business as head of the accelerator-physics department at the General Atomic corporation, in La Jolla, California, one of many secretive companies that sprouted early in the atomic era. Beyster had grown up outside of Detroit, served in the navy during World War II, and earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Michigan before migrating to Southern California in the 1950s."
Dissatisfied with General Atomic, Beyster felt they were exploiting him and not utilizing his talents correctly. Thus the creation of SAIC. Eisenhower opened Pandora's box and Beyster ran with it!
SAIC's involvement in the nuclear energy program and more importantly, the push for nuclear energy should come as no surprise. Today they trod along in lockstep with the current administration, just as they have with every other administration since their inception.
The current Bush Administration (just like it's "daddy" predecessor) loves anything nuclear. Afterall, there is money involved. Big money! This is why they are pushing so readily for the nuclear alternative "to solve," among other things, our current energy crisis, at a time when we can't figure out how to get rid of the ever growing stockpile of nuclear waste we are now swimming in and have accumulated over the past 50 odd years!
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