Source: Washington Post
A hidden world, growing beyond control
From the Executive Summary of the Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series...
The top-secret world the
government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has
become so large, so unwieldy and 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.
These are some of the
findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered
what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret
America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine
years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put
in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is
impossible to determine.
The investigation’s other
findings include:
* 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.
* An estimated 854,000
people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold
top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the
surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are
under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they
occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -
about 17 million square feet of space.
* 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.
These are not academic
issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood
shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted
not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an
alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.
They are also issues that
greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.
“There has been so much
growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA,
for the secretary of defense - is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.
Underscoring the seriousness
of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who
was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s
most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and
is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
“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.”
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