Consideringwhat had been done in the name of the United States, from Mafia assassinationplots against foreign leaders to murder, corruption and coups d'état, thatconcern was quite sensible. And there was hell to pay when the hidden historybegan to emerge.
During thenine years since Sept. 11, the national security state has doubled or tripledin size, with huge annexes in the private sectorand the culture of secrecy hasmetastasized simultaneously. As TheWashington Post reports in a landmark series titled "Top SecretAmerica," by Dana Priest and William Arkin, the dimensions of the securitycolossus are stunning. It is nothing less than a fourth branch of government,so large, so powerful and so wealthy that no other branch can even grasp it,let alone control it.
How big?Nobody knows exactly, not even the Postinvestigative team that spent two years researching and gathering manythousands of public recordsincluding government contracts, intelligencereports and corporate documentsand conducting interviews with exceptionallyknowledgeable sources.
But Priestand Arkin, whose work ought to be read by everyone, say that there are as manyas 1,271 government entities and 1,931 private companies "working onprograms related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence inabout 10,000 locations across the United States," with an estimated854,000 peoplefar more than live in the city of Washington, D.C.holdingtop-secret security clearances."
More than 30building complexes for top-secret intelligence outfits are either underconstruction now or have been built since September 2001; altogether, thesebuildings occupy 17 million square feet of space.
AreWe Any Safer?
Nobody inthe White House, Congress or any of the intelligence agencies, including thenew Office of the Director of National Intelligence, seems to have the capacityto manage the complex tangle of agencies, companies and off-the-books entitiesthat are supposed to protect us from violent extremism.
Afterreviewing the way that the Defense Department oversees its most sensitiveintelligence and operational programs last year, retired Army Lt. Gen. John R.Vines told the Post reporters that hefound the morass almost incomprehensible: "I'm not aware of any agencywith the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate allthese interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this systemdefies description."
Calling thisthing a "system" is a bit misleading. But does the leviathanoffspring of government and corporation make us safer? That, too, is difficultto determinein fact, it is impossible to determine, as the writers explain,because with "so many more employees, units and organizations, the linesof responsibility began to blur."
We have noway of knowing precisely what the national security complex does with thehundreds of billions of dollars in its shrouded budgets. What we do know isthat billions of dollars are wasted through redundancy, corruption and sheerovergrowth. Too many agencies are performing the same tasks, such as shuttingdown terrorist money transfers and generating too many reports for anyone toread.
Mostdisturbing is that so many critical functions are outsourced to privatecorporations, primarily loyal to shareholders and management. The role of thesecorporations and their lobbyists, who controlled the creation of the Departmentof Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration, is a challengeto democracy of unprecedented proportions.
Despitepresidential promises of transparency, the Barack Obama administration isfostering more secrecy, not lesswhich is exactly the wrong way to cope withthis problem. Our democracy and our security both depend on bringing thismonstrous bureaucracy to heeland that can only be done in the sunlight.
© 2010 Creators.com
