CIA Supports "Secret" CIA Scholarships

We continue to look at the issue of the militarization of civil institutions – this time in academia. The Intelligence Authorization Act is an annual bill that allocates funds for intelligence agencies. When congress passed the 2004 legislation and President Bush signed it into law, the bill drew fire from many corners because it expanded the Patriot Act and was passed with little debate.

But there was another provision in the legislation that received almost no attention. Section 318 of the bill appropriated 4 million dollars to fund a pilot program called the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, known as PRISP. The program is named after Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The scholarship was created in order to train intelligence operatives and analysts in American universities for careers in the CIA and other agencies. The students receive up to $50,000 dollars over a two-year period and are required to complete at least one summer internship at the CIA or other approved agencies. The program is veiled in secrecy - there are no public lists of the participants and there is no requirement that they disclose their affiliation to their professors. David Price in his article in CounterPunch titled, “The CIA's Campus Spies,” writes that he tried to obtain more details about the program but the CIA spokesperson was reluctant to discuss them. Price states that the agency did confirm that “PRISP now funds about 100 students who are studying at an undisclosed number of universities…. but they refused to identify which campuses are hosting these covert scholars.”

* David Price, professor of anthropology who teaches at St. Martin's university. He is also author of the book, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.
* Felix Moos, professor of anthropology who teaches at Kansas University. PRISP is largely the brain-child of professor Moos who brought the idea for the program to Senator Roberts.

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/03/1420209