At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.
The number was reported Monday in U.S. News & World Report, whose national security reporter, Kevin Whitelaw, was among the hundreds of people attending Graham's talk.
"I thought, 'I can't believe she said that,' " Whitelaw said on Monday. "The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified."
The figure itself comes as no great shock; most news reports in the past couple of years have estimated the budget at $40 billion. But the fact that Graham would say it in public is a surprise because the government has repeatedly gone to court to keep the current intelligence budget and even past budgets as far back as the 1940s from being disclosed.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said Graham would not comment. Kropf declined to say whether the figure was accurate or whether her revelation was accidental.
Graham mentioned the number on Oct. 31 at an annual conference on intelligence gathered from satellite and other photographs.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed amused satisfaction that the budget figure had slipped out.
"It is ironic," Aftergood said. "We sued the CIA four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels."
Only for a few past years has the budget been disclosed. After Aftergood's group first sued for the budget figure under the Freedom of Information Act in 1997, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, decided to make public that year's budget, $26.6 billion. The next year, Tenet did the same, revealing that the 1998 fiscal year budget was $26.7 billion.
But in 1999, Tenet reversed that policy, and budgets since then have remained classified with the support of the courts. Last year, a federal judge refused to order the CIA to release its budget totals for 1947 to 1970 — except for the 1963 budget, which Aftergood showed had already been revealed elsewhere.
In court and in response to inquiries, intelligence officials have argued that disclosing the total spying budget would create pressure to reveal more spending details, and that such revelations could aid the nation's adversaries.
That argument has been rejected by many members of Congress and outside experts, who note that most of the Defense Department budget is published in exhaustive detail without evident harm.
The national commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recommended that both the overall intelligence budget and spending by individual agencies be made public "in order to combat the secrecy and complexity" it found was harming national security.
"The taxpayers deserve to know what they're spending for intelligence," said Lee H. Hamilton, the former congressman who was vice chairman of the commission.
Even more important, Hamilton said, public discussion of the total budgets of intelligence agencies will encourage Congress to exercise "robust oversight."
The debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates at least to the 1970s, said Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian who worked for the Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies by the Senate in the mid-'70s.
Johnson said the real reason for secrecy might have less to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods than with protecting the bureaucracy.
"Maybe there's a fear that if the American people knew what was being spent on intelligence, they'd be even more upset at intelligence failures," Johnson said.

Intelligence failures my eye !

The people aren't afraid of intelligence failures, they would seem to be more upset with being spied upon themselves using their own tax dollars.

This is only a declaired budget as the CIA often uses the military to supplement their activities as well as the drug money laundering through off shore accounts and shell companies.
The 500 billion Savings and loan collapse ( which we are still paying for ) was caused when the airlines used for transport of heroin, cocaine and arms failed due to the fraudulent non existent commercial book cooking.
The CIA is a disease upon our nation. It should be abolished and criminal proceedings begun for most of their field agents and supervisors...

Or is smashy getting more retarded with every succeeding, boring post?
...
You need to get out more.

And how would a mindless hippie know anything about someone else having problems?

Be specific. Give examples.

Mental cripples are like rotten fruit, you can tell by the smell.
And I think the Radical Fairies are cool.

More on the Criminal Intelligence Agency
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The CIA Role in the Savings and Loan Crisis

SYNOPSIS: It is now estimated that some 500 billion taxpayer dollars will be needed to bail out the savings and loan crisis. One very obvious question regarding this scandal is what happened to so much money?

At least one investigative journalist, Pete Brewton, of The Houston Post, believes he has the answer. On February 4, 1990, Brewton wrote, "During an eight-month investigation into the role of fraud in the nation's savings and loan crisis, The Post has found evidence suggesting a possible link between the Central Intelligence Agency and organized crime in the failure of at least 22 thrifts, including 16 in Texas."

As to the practices of the CIA in torture,

-The manuals also refer to one or two weeks of "practical work" with prisoners which suggests that U.S. trainers may have taken part in interrogations with Latin American militaries. This supports claims by Latin American prisoners and U.S. nun Diana Ortiz, tortured by the Guatemalan army in 1989, that "U.S. personnel were present in interrogation and torture rooms."Sister Ortiz was kidnapped, taken to a secret prison and repeatedly raped and tortured by troops commanded by General Hector Gramajo (a CIA asset and graduate of the U.S. Army School of the Americas). She stated that "the chief of her tormentors was a [U.S.] American who seemed to be linked to the U.S. embasssy." The Guatemalan soldiers called him "Alejandro".

Ortiz's back and chest were burned more than 111 times with cigarettes. She described being "lowered into an open pit packed with...bodies of children, women and men, some decapitated, some lying face up and caked with blood, some dead, some alive and all swarming with rats." She was also forced to kill another prisoner and Alejandro threatened to blackmail her with evidence of this act.-
http://www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/ciatorture.html