Why This Gigantic "Intelligence" Apparatus?

By Robert Higgs
Friday, December 17, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Mises Institute"


[From the Beacon blog of the Independent Institute (2010).]

On July 19, 2010, the Washington Post publishedthe first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic US apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost-unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.

Among Priest and Arkin's findings from a two-year study are the following:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 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.

[We] 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.

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.

According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 "the attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing." I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already-enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.

As Priest and Arkin report, "The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on September 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that "the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending." To be sure, they received more than they could spendresponsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it's not as if they were spending their own money.

"The most plausible reason why so few attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out."

Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers' money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It's loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.

And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one.

It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade — after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI "captures" the unfortunate victims of the government's entrapment.)

So the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small — not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent.

Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can't be done won't be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.

The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale — youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and who know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places — indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside.

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That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part's "findings" to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers' money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it — and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.

What we see here is not really an "intelligence" or counterterrorism operation at all. It's a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to "fight terrorism."

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. Send himmail. See Robert Higgs's article archives.

This article was first published as "Why This Gigantic 'Intelligence' Apparatus? Follow the Money," on the Beacon blog of the Independent Institute, July 20, 2010.

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Inside Top Secret America

By Lindsay Beyerstein
August 30, 2010
Courtesy Of "Global Research"

In July, the Washington Post published the Top Secret America project -- a sweeping portrait of America’s heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment. Lead reporter Dana Priest calls it the “vast and hidden apparatus of the war on terror.” Priest, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, described the project as the most challenging investigation of her career. She teamed up with national security journalist William Arkin and a team of about 20 Post staffers to create an “alternative geography” of a hidden world that has exploded since the attacks of 9/11. At last count, the official U.S. intelligence budget stood at $75 billion -- more than two and a half times what it was on September 10, 2001. The remarkable three-part series (I, II, III) and its intricate multimedia Web site attracted some initial praise, but just as quickly seemed to drop off the map. This article is an attempt to revisit some of the Priest and Arkin’s most shocking discoveries. Top Secret America is based on hundreds of interviews with government officials, contractors and independent experts; satellite imagery; government contracts; property records; promotional materials from contractors; photo reconnaissance of suspected intelligence facilities, and more. To give a sense of the physical layout of Top Secret America, Priest and Arkin plotted government and corporate secret locations on a map. The reporters also compiled their data in the searchable Top Secret America database (TSA). They found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms doing work classified as “top secret,” for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites around the country. 533 of the contracting firms were founded after the 9/11 attacks. About 110 contractors do about 90 percent of the top-secret work. The biggest of the big are household words: Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and SAIC. The TSA database doesn’t include firms that only do merely “secret” work because the reporters found too many to count. Contractors make up nearly 30 percent of the workforce of America’s intelligence agencies. At the Department of Homeland Security the ratio of contractors to staffers is 50-50. The Post estimates that of the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors.  The U.S. has become utterly dependent on contractors for basic national security and intelligence functions. The National Reconnaissance Office literally couldn’t launch satellites without contractors. Contractors do everything from recruiting spies to interrogating detainees to processing civil forfeitures in the war on drugs. CIA director Leon Panetta admitted to the Post that dependence on contractors is a liability because the main duty of corporations "is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict." As Jeremy Scahill pointed out in the Nation, these reservations didn’t stop Panetta from approving a new $100 million contract with the scandal-plagued private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater. Over 300 recruiting firms known as “body shops” specialize in hooking the federal government up with private contractors. Industry insiders told the Post they could charge nearly $50,000 per placement.  The higher the security clearance, the more money a contractor makes. Ironically many of these contractors are retired intelligence officers supplementing their federal pensions by moonlighting for the government. The Bush administration justified massive outsourcing by claiming that contractors were ultimately cheaper than federal employees. However, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates admitted to the Post that federal workers cost the government about 25 percent less than contractors. The series briefly alludes to some high-profile misconduct by contractors including detainee torture at CIA black sites, Blackwater’s civilian-shooting spree, MZM’s bribes to a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee for CIA contracts, and the “lewd-partying scandal” that engulfed ArmorGroup guards at the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul. The ArmorGroup guards were the national security geniuses who were busted with photographs they took of themselves taking vodka shots from their comrades’ butt cracks. Contractors have permeated every sphere of intelligence from aircraft and satellite operations to human intelligence to information technology. Contractors do things you’d assume would be the exclusive preserve of government agents. The TSA database lists 18 government organizations contracting with 37 private companies to conductpsychological operations; 16 government organizations using 50 companies for “special military operations” (e.g., SWAT teams and unconventional warfare); and 14 government organizations contracting with 50 companies for top-secret conventional military operations. Top-secret projects aren’t the exclusive preserve of familiar players like the CIA, the Pentagon, the NSA, and the FBI, either. You might be surprised to learn that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Labor, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service also do some top-secretwork. Thirty-two government organizations employ 36 different companies for counter-drug operations. Many of the entries include links to the contractors’ Web sites. “To you, it means not only more bang for your buck – but better bang,” says the self-proclaimed “trim, nimble” J.R. Mannes Defense Services Corp. of its own performance. J.R. Mannes is listed as a counter-drug contractor in the TSA database, but its Web site reads more like that of an elite escort service. The “Let’s Partner” tab of its Web site promises: “You’ll be hard-pressed to find another resource whose principals and board members have deeper experience or more impressive credentials in the art.” All this prowess results in “smoother and more successful outcomes on every level of assignment for you and your clients.” Perhaps the most alarming conclusion of the Top Secret America project is that nobody really knows if any of this is making us any safer. “[The system] 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,” the authors conclude. The sheer scope of intelligence activity has exploded beyond anyone’s ability to keep track of the search, let alone interpret the vast amount of data that the enterprise churns out every day. One senior official confessed to thePost, "I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything." Disturbingly, this guy is one of only a handful of so-called “Super Users” at the Department of Defense who are supposed to know all the department’s activities. The Post found that a large number of agencies were investigating the same questions. Defenders of the system say that a certain amount of redundancy is a feature, not a bug.  “The architects of the U.S. intelligence system wanted different eyes to look at the same data from diverse perspectives because they wanted to avoid another surprise attack like Pearl Harbor,” former deputy assistant secretary of defense Tom Mahnken wrote in response to the TSA project. His critique would be more convincing if the various agencies talked to each other. Generally speaking, they don’t. The Post found that many agencies can’t even communicate internally. There’s too much information coming in and not enough experienced people to interpret it and synthesize it. The NSA intercepts 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications every day and divides some percentage of these between 70 different databases. The same problem repeats itself in every intelligence-gathering organization. The Post reports that at least 263 intelligence organizations have been created or reorganized in response to 9/11. The Bush administration created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to keep track of the massive undertaking in 2004. Unfortunately ODNI hasn’t been very successful, in part because the agency has no legal or budgetary control over the agencies it supposedly supervising. The CIA has been known to thwart ODNI by simply classifying reports as too secret for ODNI to see. It’s not like Congress is minding the store, either. In 2004, the 9/11 Commission unanimously pronounced Congressional oversight of intelligence to be “dysfunctional.” In 2010, a followup report by the co-chairs of the commission concluded that while some progress had been made, congressional oversight of intelligence and homeland security remained an “unworkable” system and a “jurisdictional melee.” What’s remarkable about the Top Secret America project is not so much the conclusions -- it should come as no surprise that the U.S. spends billions of dollars on a bureaucratic under-supervised intelligence apparatus that enriches private contractors without necessarily making the country safer. What’s remarkable is the thoroughness with which these claims are documented. Arguably, in attempting to represent the state of such a complex system Top Secret America recreates the information overload in microcosm. The end product is so big and so dense that it’s hard to take it all in. Initially, senior intelligence officials made some weak attempts to push back against Top Secret America, particularly against what they called the “myth” that contractors perform inherently governmental functions. They didn’t take issue with the Post’s claims about what contractors do, they quibbled about the definition of “inherently governmental.” In the end, the intelcrats let the conclusions of the series stand more or less unchallenged. Some may even be grateful. Priest and Arkin probably taught them a lot about their own business. Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative journalist in Brooklyn, NY. Her reporting has appeared in Newsweek, Salon, Slate, In These Times and other publications. She was the recipient of a 2009 Project Censored Award.

Global Research Articles by Lindsay Beyerstein