The first installment of a three-day series on Top Secret America has been published by the Washington Post. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest and her colleague William Arkin, the series represents the outcome of a two-year investigation into "what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight." An extensive, searchable database on their research can be found here.
Their findings will be no surprise to James Bamford, who in 1982 wrote The Puzzle Palace, the scary first-ever outside look into the doings of the National Security Agency. Nor will they be a surprise to Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, who has previously covered much of the same ground as the Post and whose book I reviewed here.
Among the conclusions:
• [The program built after the September 11 attacks is so] secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. ...
• Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
• Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
The latter complaint is nothing new. It just shows continuing growth of a system in which vast gobs of information from human and other intelligence sources are promiscuously hoovered up, reported on and rarely viewed beyond their executive summaries, if that.
Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines said:
"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."
The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."
Writes Marcy Wheeler:
...what I find utterly shocking is that today’s 5315-word installment includes only this reference to the simmering battle over intelligence reform and the Director of National Intelligence position and tomorrow’s confirmation hearing for James Clapper!
"There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God," said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence. [MW's emphasis] ...
Every single one of the issues that has led to tomorrow’s confirmation hearing is an issue that goes to the heart of the problems identified in the WaPo piece: the ongoing lack of real value-added analysis to make sense of all the intelligence collected, the opacity and potential waste and fraud of the entire IIC, and the turf battles that contribute to that waste.
Digesting all this, and the two installments yet to come, will take time. But they are only details of the big picture we already know about. The massive national security state, an ever-more militarized, ever-more unaccountable system, a shadow empire of public officials interlaced with private companies and free-lance operators, is already more powerful and dangerous than anything visible to us.
As Glenn Greenwald says, and the Post illustrates, not only is this gargantuan apparatus a threat to the safety of our liberty, its vastness also makes it a lousy guarantor of the safety it was supposedly designed to protect us against. As he reminds us, before the older system was enlarged after September 11, we had the dots of intelligence that an attack was on the way. The failure came in connecting those dots.
Says Greenwald:
We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
As we have learned since Bamford wrote his book nearly 30 years ago, exposing such hidden operations counts for little if nobody dares do something to curtail them.