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Last week, after a two-year investigation, the Washington Post published “Top Secret America”, a report that documents the radical expansion of America's intelligence community in the years following the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It reveals the stupendous waste, redundancy, and largesse of an institution growing so large that its members itself are struggling to understand what methods and tools they have put into use are actually working to keep terrorists at bay.
It reads as much like a tragically comic Kurt Vonnegut novel than as an analysis of the state of American Intelligence. The story states, “In Washington and 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...about 17 million square feet of space.” The Post reported that 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearance, 1.5 times the size of the entire population of Washington, D.C. A quarter million of these people are private contractors. The plethora of organizations and agencies avoid government scrutiny, have no requirement for any transparency whatever, and often end up doing the same work as other groups under the same umbrella. 51 federal organizations and military commands track the flow of money to and from terrorist groups. The rapid construction of this community, which amounts, according to the report, to “An alternative geography of the United States”, has created chaos and confusion within the ranks.
For example, at the top of the heap there are a group known as Super Users. This handful of senior officials have the ability to know about every department's activities. But, as one Super User said, “I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything.” Another demanded that a briefing, littered with presentation and presentation be halted. “I wasn't remembering any of it.” Retired Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was was in charge of reviewing the way the Defense Department's most sensitive programs were monitored, declared, “The complexity of this system defies description...We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”
It seems that after the American military-industrial complex successfully managed to usher in Total War and then Permanent War, the threat of terrorism has seamlessly introduced both Total and Permanent Intelligence. Facing an enemy so fragmented, so difficult to even identify, the only answer has been to try to cover every angle, in every way. It is like eating every piece of food one can find, to make sure you don't miss any of the healthy stuff. But why so much and why so quickly? Why has the growth been unimpeded by the nation's financial difficulties? The answer can be seen in the way in which the military-industrial complex went about establishing themselves as an indespensible, untouchable piece of American power and wealth. The idea was to become embedded as fast as possible, to grab a piece of the pie large enough that when the next one comes out of the oven, they're simply owed another helping. It is through its incredible build up that it can best ensure its permancy, or at least make it incredibly difficult to be reduced, and practically impossible to be removed. This is after all, the new century's greatest growth industry. Why would it avoid redundancy, or apply any degree of selectivity to their intelligence-gathering, when its very strength is found in how much it does, how much it knows? So, it spreads out, the most important part of any given project or agency merely being that it does something. American intelligence agencies are estimated to intercept 1.7 billion emails per day, a massive amount when you consider that an estimated 60 billion emails are sent around the world in a given twenty-four hour span. Quantity has completely outstripped quality, and this new, insanely powerful institution is the result.
But, in reality, it is more than just an institution, it is a culture, a community, a way of life. Small “clusters” throughout the country that house block after block of huge buildings that cannot be located on places like Google Maps. Surrounding them are their greatest products; very wealthy people. Six of the ten wealthiest counties in the country are ones in which these agencies have set up shop. It is here where members of this runaway power structure live their lives, raise their kids, and reinforce their own culture. One particularly frightening example of this is found in some of the schools, whom the Post discovered “were adopting a curriculm this fall that will teach students as young as ten what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behaviour would disqualify them.” The message in this dystopian non-fiction is clear; these agencies, these people and their children, are in it for the long haul.
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