Tim Shorrocks notes the ties that blind at The Daily Beast:

“Sidney Harman, who just bought Newsweek magazine, has for years been influential in the area of national security—and not just through his marriage to Rep. Jane Harman.

It’s well-known that Sidney Harman, the electronics mogul who just bought Newsweek, is married to Rep. Jane Harman, one of Washington’s heavyweights on intelligence.

Rep. Harman, a Democrat, spent eight years on the House Intelligence Committee and is chairwoman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism. She has had an intimate, and sometimes controversial, relationship to America’s spy agencies during her eight terms in Congress.

But few in Washington are aware that the real intelligence insider of the Harman family may be Sidney himself, through his connections to an obscure but highly influential organization known as Business Executives for National Security.

In many ways, BENS can be considered the godfather of the contracting revolution that transformed the U.S. government into a vast, $600 billion market for corporate America and made national security—and spying in particular—a gross vehicle for private enterprise. Over the past 28 years, BENS has participated in dozens of high-level commissions that have altered the way the Pentagon and the intelligence community do business, and has become a favored perch for former high-ranking officials and generals, from Henry Kissinger to Gen. Peter Pace.

Its leaders have historically been quite conservative; barely two months after the 9/11 attacks, founding BENS Chairman Stanley Weiss called on the Bush administration to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in the pages of the International Herald Tribune.

But it can also be pragmatic and run against the grain, as it did last year when it sent a delegation of American executives, including Ross Perot, to North Korea to meet with the government of Kim Jong Il to use the incentive of U.S. investments to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

Founded by Weiss, a mining and chemical executive who for years served as a director of Harman’s audio-equipment company, BENS today represents about 350 of the country’s largest manufacturing, transportation, information technology, communications, and national-security firms.

Harman himself chaired the organization’s executive committee from 1982 to 2009 and “contributed over $1 million over the years” to the organization, Weiss told The Daily Beast in an email from Indonesia. Although its CEO, retired Army General Montgomery C. Meigs, manages the organization, its corporate members, led by Harman, have set the pace. “Dr. Harman played an important role [in BENS] for a quarter century,” Weiss told me. “He was deeply involved in all aspects of BENS’ work.” Harman could not be reached for comment.

Originally, it was a kind of liberal alternative to the hawkish business organizations that flourished during the Cold War, and its early efforts focused on arms treaties. But it has evolved into a full-time consultant to the Pentagon on business practices, functioning as a liaison between government and industry. (Weiss, speaking for the organization, said BENS’ efforts in defense, intelligence and homeland security are aimed at “helping the country deal with the very bloated element of the miltary-industrial-congressional complex.”)

In its advisory role, BENS has been a driving force in the privatization of U.S. defense capabilities, including the outsourcing of the precious intelligence assets that Rep. Harman had direct oversight over for eight years as the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Since 2001, it has expanded its ties with the intelligence community; last year, it elected Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency (and now a contractor himself), to its advisory council.

One of BENS’ biggest advisory projects came during the “reinventing government” days of the Clinton administration. The Tail-to-Tooth Commission, which included Harman and numerous defense contractors and privatization advocates, proposed a sweeping array of policy changes, and its recommendations were enthusiastically embraced by both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Thus began a massive push toward outsourcing—and a new era defined by companies like Halliburton, and later, Blackwater……”