What do you get when you build your intelligence service up to such a size that it occupies three times the floorspace as the main centre of your executive government? When the services employ about150% of the population of your capital city? And when the amount of intelligence reports produced are so huge that a large proportion are just ignored completely?
Surely you’d have some kind of dictatorship or police state on the scale of China or North Korea or some tinpot Arab state. You’d also have the United States of America.
The Washington Post has produced an investigative report called “Top Secret America” (TSA), which has become effectively the fourth of three branches of US government since the September 11 terrorist attacks and has created “what amounts to an alternative geography”. You’d think something this big would be effective in protecting Americans from terror. But as the Post argues, “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”.
That’s right. The “Land of the Free” has a huge but secretive inner core to protect the freedoms of the free but that the free have little knowledge of. And there is no co-ordinating “American Homeland Security Agency” (AHSA — credits to The Hollowmen.
All this creates huge opportunities for corrupted or manufactured intelligence to enter the system and lead to bungle after bungle. TSA bungles could lead to the wrong person being indefinitely detained, deported, tortured or even killed. One such person could be Australian citizen David Hicks, who is currently seeking to have his conviction overturned. Another such person would definitely have to be Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, released from Guantanamo gulag without a single charge being laid.
Most TSA spending went on during the Bush/Cheney administration. “[T]he Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending … In all, at least 263 organisations have been created or reorganised as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support … With so many more employees, units and organisations, the lines of responsibility began to blur”. And this was an allegedly conservative President who believed in small government.
TSA has a strong private industry focus, with about 2000 contractor companies and a staggering 850,000 people with top security clearance. Despite even US Defence Secretary Robert Gates saying that “getting your arms around [the growth of intelligence networks] … is a challenge”, the response from the intelligence community was a predictable denial.
So much money is now being spent, we are told, to fight violent extremism. Yet some 25 years ago, huge amounts were spent to support the same violent extremism. Much of the money used to fight the Soviet Union, Reagan’s so-called “Evil Empire”, was spent on a group of “freedom fighters” in a tiny country called Afghanistan. Among America’s allies was an Afghan faction that included one Mullah Omar. Also allied to the US was a chap named Usama, a young member of a Saudi business family with close ties to the Bush family.
And now we are back there fighting the forces of Mullah Omar and Usama. And losing. And its costing America more money than anyone in the US government can count. It’s also costing Australia troops.
So it’s a case of too much intelligence but not enough intelligence.
It really is incredible; one of the criticisms in the wake of 9/11 was that intelligence was uncordinated, with essentially the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. A Director of National Intelligence was created to unify intelligence under one umbrella. The net result as the Washington Post has discovered is a vast uncontrolled web of government and private security agencies with minimal interaction. – God save America!
What drivel. First year pol sci students would have done better.
We are rapidly approaching, if not already there, a similar situation in Australia.
trouble is they are concentrating on the wrong areas e.g. ease of access at Sydney Airport “security areas”.
It may have got a quantum worse since 9/11 but it has been thus since the 50s probably. That SBS doco a while back on the KGB colonel Vladimir Vetrov, code-named Farewell (and title of a current cinema-release movie) who leaked an incredible amount of stuff to the west was very revealing on this point.
Through accident of his history (he worked in Paris and became friends with a french engineer who later became the conduit) he chose to leak to the french. Instead of complicated blinds and hides and the usual subterfuge to get his leaks out without being exposed, he did it extraordinarily simply (ie. hidden in plain view) via this french engineer. For most of the period only a tiny handful of french knew of the operation which is why it persisted for years and years. As several experts, French and Americans and Russians, remarked, if the CIA had been involved it would have been revealed quickly because of all the factors in Irfan Yusuf’s article.
Of course it was the same kind of reasons how the FBI managed to ignore explicit warnings from several of their own people about suspicious events leading up to 9/11. Once any organization gets this big, it is almost inevitable. On top of that there is the inter-agency and even intra-agency feuding and competition that causes so much dysfunction. Again one reason why 9/11 occurred is that the FBI did not release the files/photos etc of the suspects to the airport security authority–especially since most of the 9/11 terrorists used their known names in buying their tickets and checking in at the airport.
USA: Land of the security check and the home of the terrorized.