Top Secret America

The Washington Post published an investigative piece by Dana Priest and William Arkin on an alternative reality America, which lacks any thorough oversight--the top secret world created after 9/11--the latest installment in our military/ terrorist complex. Today's article is the result of a two-year investigation by the Post reporters into the unprecedented spending on alleged security and intelligence. The alternative America makes Too Big Too Fail banks look puny. And, of course, this behemoth hasn't made us any safer or secure but probably has put us at greater risk.

Every American should read this piece just for the scale of the anti-terrorism effort and the sheer lunacy of the waste and redundancy.

Here are some of the highlights:

*There are some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

*An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington,D.C. hold top-secret security clearances. I can't wait for a follow-up article on counter-intelligence.

*Since September 2001, in Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built. Together they occupy the equivalent of 3 Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capital buildings--about 17 million square feet of office space.

*There are 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities,that track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. (Consider there are about 50 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and another 350 in Pakistan and about 300 in Yemen.)

*Analysts who have to make sense of documents and conversations obtained by spying generate 50,000 intelligence reports per year--a volume so large many are routinely ignored.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence reside, only a handful of officials--called Super Users--have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But even these officials can't take notes on the intelligence and programs they are monitoring.

I guess the good news is that all this acts as a stimulus to regional construction projects. But there is virtually no oversight, no accountability, no budget limits and ,in my opinion, no real effectiveness.

If you want some idea of the impossibility of digesting all the raw intelligence gathered and its storage, I recommend James Bamford The Shadow Factory (Doubleday, 2008), which examines just the insanity at the NSA and the technological challenges of storing information many times that contained in all the world's libraries combined. He likens it to Jorge Luis Borge's "Library of Babel", where "there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences."

Be safe out there!