According to the Washington Post, the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.”

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

Check out their charts, they show the expansive nature of the National Security structure. Somewhat related, I was recently watching a documentary on the growth of the intelligence community before this was published; internet traffic is being monitored from secret rooms in some of the nation’s top telecoms.

It’s a popular game now, seeing how much bad press you can give BP in a given day; and as I sit and let Keith Olbermann’s program run in the background I’m reminded of one thing: Keith Olbermann is a pompous moron…and the campaign against BP is much worse than BP’s campaign. While that may be two things, it really doesn’t matter since numbers don’t mean anything to the anti-BP crowd. Sure BP messed up (as did the government) and and now there is a huge pool of bumbling crude floating around in the ocean (a pool of oil which is nothing compared to what the U.S. consumes on a daily basis.) However, people have allowed themselves to become so full of crap regarding BP that it makes BP look clean. Here me out. Apparently BP running advertisements takes their attention away from cleaning up the oil spill…since I guess the PR team should be out there with a mop and bucket. I guess with this logic, Apple’s spending on their advertising campaign takes quality away from their product and NBC advertising their news takes away from the quality of their news. We should all know this is total horsecrap, yet just the other day the media began doubling down; I read a story where a media outlet has claimed that BP buying keyword advertisements on search engines is “clogging the flow of information.” Apparently BP is now a magical entity that erases all search terms under the actual advertisement and blocks out the sun as well.

Not only are people making absolutely no sense in how BP spends it’s PR money, which has nothing to do with its ability in cleaning up oil, but now everyone is an expert on oil. That’s right, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Jim Bob who lives on Main St all know more than the engineers who have been doing this their entire life. All I hear in the media currently is “why isn’t BP doing this,” of course this question is asked by a talking head who clearly doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Roger Ebert said BP was downplaying something that may only end in them nuking the oil well, he no doubt got this information from some pseudo-scientist who was on The Today Show or something. Which brings me to a larger point, being an “expert” on TV doesn’t make you an “expert” it means you’ve been on TV before and the network pulled you from their Rolodex of scientists who have done well on their networks before. Watching Maddow tell me about the evils of oil, while riding around in the wetland on a gasoline powered boat…just doesn’t make much sense. If Keith Olbermann and his guests are experts on oil, or politics for that matter, then Dick Morris is a genius and knows the meaning of life and the universe (not that Olbermann is the only one doing it, even Fox is doing it…and I thought they were “pro-corporation”).

On a side note: Olbermann has declared BP to be “BS” which is very clever since I call MSNBC, BSNBC.

Free Market Mojo has conducted an interview with Reverend Robert A. Sirico that addresses this very issue, here’s a snippet and a link to the full interview:

FMM: A libertarian-minded Christian must, in effect, follow two sets of standards. A good example might be the gay marriage issue. Christian doctrine, typically, is opposed to a homosexual union, but the principles of individual liberty do not leave room for a government to intervene in such a case. How does a Christian transition his personal values to his political beliefs?

Father Sirico: I must confess that I’m somewhat dissatisfied with the word “libertarian” in much the same way and for some of the same reasons that I’m dissatisfied with what “capitalism” (a Marxist word to begin with). It is almost inevitably the case that when these terms are employed one gets bogged down in having to make distinctions as to why for example libertarianism does not necessarily mean libertinism, or why capitalism is not state-capitalism, etc.

If by libertarian you mean the belief that the political end of man is liberty, then I am comfortable (Lord Acton having employed the phrase). Further, if the political sphere is to be shrunk to administer the proper functions of government, rather than the pervasive and invasive state apparatus that we have grown accustomed to, then in the end it means to me that the libertarian idea is a modest one – not a whole philosophy of life, an aesthetic, and epistemology or a soteriology, etc., but merely a prescription on governmental intervention. It helps define the limits of government vis-à-vis human freedom, but could not tell us what we ought to do.

Christianity, on the other hand, goes beyond even a philosophy of life: it is an account of the meaning of existence and has and contains in it those moral norms which help man to flourish according to his nature, and how the human race can establish a right relationship with its Creator through the redemption wrought by Jesus Christ, who, in the words of the late pope, ‘reveals man to himself’.

Read the entire interview here.