Non non, il y a erreur… Au lieu de $48 milliards, il faut lire $60 milliards

Très récemment encore, nous donnions les plus récentes estimations du budget du renseignement aux USA (les 16 agences concernées), qui atteindrait $48 milliards pour 2008. Certains ne sont pas d’accord, et même ils nous signalaient le moyen d’aller vérifier la justesse de ce désaccord sur des sites officiels où se sont glissés dans la sélection des documents mis en ligne.

Sur son site romantiquement nommé thespywhobilledme.com, l’universitaire R J Hillhouse détaille, le 3 juin (par l’intermédiaire de RAW Story) la réalité du budget du renseignement US grâce à des documents mis en ligne par erreur par la DIA. (Le courrier accompagnant l’article signale que ces documents ont disparu du site de la DIA le 4 juin). Il en résulte que ce n’est pas $48 milliards qu’il faut lire pour le budget des 16 agences de renseignement pour 2008, mais $60 milliards.

«Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed.

»In the presentation originally made to a DIA conference in Colorado on May 14, Terri Everett, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence senior procurement executive, revealed that 70% of the total Intelligence Community budget is spent on contractors. (This was reported by Tim Shorrock on Salon.com.) Everett also included a slide depicting the trend of award dollars to contractors by the Intelligence Community from fiscal year 95 through a partial year of fiscal year 06 (i.e. through August 31st of FY06.) Because these figures are classified, a scale of the total number of award dollars was omitted from the Y-axis of the bar chart. The PowerPoint presentation was first obtained by Shorrock for Salon.com and it was later posted on the DIA's website where I downloaded it. Although it would not have been visible to the conference attendees, the data underlying the bar graph--the total amount of Intelligence Community funds spent on contractors--is readily available in the actual presentation.

(…)

»This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion budget for FY 08. It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently. Greater control and oversight of the Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on intelligence government-wide. To this end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS). In the report from the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a “single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System.” It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what “will be used for further inquiry by the Committee’s budget and audit staffs and will be a baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future reports.”.»

Bien entendu, il y a toutes les raisons de croire que Hillhouse est plus proche de la vérité que les sénateurs des comités ad hoc. Une phrase du plus haut intérêt dans le texte de Hillhouse, qu’il faut évidemment retenir, est celle-ci : «It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently.» Nous sommes effectivement dans l’univers complètement opaque, post-kafkaïen, d’une bureaucratie qui ne se connaît plus elle-même. Il s’agit d’un monde hors de tout contrôle, mais dont la probable réalité par rapport à celle qui nous est offerte est toujours plus haute lorsqu’il s’agit des questions de dépenses. Il s’agit d’un monde automatique, aveugle, qui inspire notre politique générale de cette même façon automatique et aveugle, sans que personne n’ait l’esprit de poser des questions vraiment sérieuses. Here is the way it is.

Mis en ligne le 11 juin 2007 à 15H50