The Washington Post: 'Top Secret America' — "A hidden world, growing beyond control"

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events.  (caption from source — photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

 
This article published yesterday in The Washington Post has received widespread attention.  Written by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, the article recounts that people in positions of government authority chose to bolster military and defense industries after the events of September 11, 2001 and this spending has continued to increase.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda.  It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003.  That was only a beginning.
 
The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001.  But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

After reading the article, I was left with the realization that all this money could have been  spent in ways dedicated to improving not only the lives of American citizens but also those of people throughout the world.  What better way could there be to encourage diplomacy and eradicate incentives for terrorism?
 
Links to the article were featured on many popular websites including Yahoo!, where headline commentary referred to the article as an "intelligence-complex exposé."  An estimate is given that now in the United States 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances.   A noteworthy perspective was presented from 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."

"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."
 
The Post's investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials.  Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.

 
There is also a revealing anecdote about "an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers" — Special Access Programs.
 

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it.  Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer.  "What do you mean you can't tell me?  I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange. 

 
A simple and basic conclusion about the information presented by this article is an appraisal that clandestine agendas  discount the spiritual value of honesty espoused in all of the world's wisdom traditions.  It would seem humanity is faced with an age where secrecy is an accepted paradigm.
 
It seems important to remind that any orientation of a person toward countries, companies or a particular office as domains of perfunctory acquiescence will result with decisions weighing heavily on one's conscience as one becomes aware of concealed information or circumstances having an adverse impact on the welfare of others.  
 
I heard Dana Priest and William M. Arkin interviewed yesterday by Neal Conan on the NPR radio program "Talk of the Nation."  Here is a transcript.  At one point Neal mentioned that the acting director of national intelligence, David Gompert, wrote a response to the article and said that U.S. intelligence is achieving untold successes every day.  Neil commented, "The fact that there were only a few high-profile terrorist attacks and attempts recently means they are doing a good job, that the picture you paint is not the intelligence community that we know, as he put it."
 
Dana Priest then observed, "Well, first of all, we asked them to share with us anything they could, plots that were foiled that we could put in the paper because we didn't have many examples.  We said give us things, just in generalities.  You know, they're always worried about giving away too much.  And we didn't receive anything back.  So if they're out there, and they happened, you know, we could not find out about them."