Top Secret America - Washington Post - The Fourth Branch Of Pirates

[mexika]

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A hidden world, growing beyond control

Monday, July 19, 2010; 1:53 AM

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


These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that 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.

The investigation's other findings include:

* 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.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of 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. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"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.

The Post's online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Today's article describes the government's role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday's article describes the government's dependence on private contractors. Wednesday's is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.

Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. "Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, 'Okay, we've built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?' " he said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he's begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said. "Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that."

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. "Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers," he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. "I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to," he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country," he said. "The attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing."

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can't conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn't include the Air Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a big "Welcome!" sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.


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[h3rm35]

US spying spawns a dystopian epidemic
By David Isenberg

Considering revelations in recent years ranging from renditions, the overseas Central Intelligence Agency prison system, torture during interrogations and National Security Agency wiretapping, aka "warrantless surveillance", it is difficult to claim, a-la Claude Rains in the movie Casablanca, that anyone is "shocked, shocked" to find the United States intelligence system so cumbersome that oversight is virtually impossible.

According to a Washington Post report last month, in a three-part series titled "Top Secret America" by Dana Priest and William Arkin, following a two-year investigation, "The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it's



fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping citizens safe."

The fact that the Post described a bureaucracy resembling the Oceanian province of Airstrip One in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four - a world of perpetual war and pervasive government surveillance that allows the party to manipulate and control the public - is just icing on the cake for those who relish irony.

That there is an alternative "Top Secret America" spread around the country is less worrisome than the fact that nobody is really sure of its scope or activities. In that sense it resembles Brazil, the 1985 film directed by Terry Gilliam, almost as much as it does Oceania. The ending of the first article in the Post series therefore seems particularly apt:

Meanwhile, five miles [eight kilometers] southeast of the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. Soon, on the grounds of the former St Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a US$3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon.

In fact, the existence of a Top Secret America is just another aspect of what afflicts American culture and its political system. It is the security counterpart of what academic Janine Wedel detailed in her 2009 book Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. This described various US political operators converging into a single network who have risen to power on an unprecedented confluence of four transformational 20th and 21st century developments: government outsourcing and deregulation, the end of the Cold War, the growth of information technologies, and "the embrace of 'truthiness'."

What Priest and Arkin well know but never explicitly wrote was that after 9/11 the George W Bush administration set into motion counter-surveillance allegedly to prevent terrorists attacking America. Subsequently, US government counter-surveillance networks have become huge, supported by thousands of government employees and private contractors, many duplicating work. There are now tens of thousands of US government counter-surveillance agents, employees and private contractors monitoring US citizens' private records and communications with no US Congress or public oversight.

Put another way, the real problem is that the companies listed in the series are almost exclusively set up for the sole purpose of conducting work that belongs inside regulated and monitored government agencies.

The Post series is important insofar as it confers the official imprimatur of elite journalistic recognition that the counter-terrorism complex it details - including uncoordinated and sometimes little known entities of the military, intelligence community, homeland security, and even civil government - is growing faster than America's obesity epidemic.

But in many respects it is only codifying what has been observed and recorded by many other reporters, academics and scholars in recent years by journalists like Greg Miller (formerly of the Los Angeles Times), Tim Shorrock who wrote the book Spies For Hire and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times. (It was Shorrock who in 2007 wrote a major series in Salon disclosing that 70% of the US intelligence budget is spent on private-sector contractors). In other words, it is an example of news not being news until is published by the Washington Post.

This is not to diminish the importance of what the Post did. The website it set up is a comprehensive source of information for those who may have wondered who was doing what but did not know where to look. Truthfully, there is far more information in the online site than in the print articles. The online presentation includes a link analysis application, which allows you to look at government agencies and look at functions and see how many contractors work for them at the top-secret level and at how many locations and to look at some of the featured companies discussed in the article series and look at who they work for and some of their locations.

There's also a mapping application that allows people to delve into the presence of "Top Secret America" in their own community. And then there is a profile of each of those 3,000-plus entities, where you can look in more detail at their revenue, the size of the companies, and what it is that they do in this field. Much of this reflects the influence of Arkin, who has worked on the subject of government secrecy and national security affairs for more than 30 years and is well known for ferreting out difficult to find data. Nobody else has put together in one place online a searchable database allowing one to explore the connections among the thousands of government organizations and private contractors. For example, one can find out that the private security firm Xe Services, formerly Blackwater, which has been much in the news in recent years for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan, does two of 23 types of top-secret work for the government.

It is also reassuring that the Post had the financial resources to support a two-year-long investigative project, although given its status, that is not altogether surprising. Still, although not without its limitations, it is by far the most detailed, comprehensive online data visualization on this subject put together to date. Earlier efforts such as "Who's Who in Intelligence Contractors", a collaboration between Sharrock and CorpWatch, was far less comprehensive.

But the Post series was not nearly as harsh as it could have been. The series opened with an overview, followed by a focus on the large number of contractors supporting the intelligence enterprise, and a third part looking at a specific community (the Fort Meade/BWI Airport area in Maryland) that has expanded in part due to Intelligence Community (IC) growth. The Washington Post is expected to work with Public Broadcasting Service's Frontline to add a television program which will run in October.

But the Post left out links between individual contractors and specific agencies, although it still cited contractors and their locations.

Still, the IC was concerned enough that a memorandum was sent out in early July by Art House, director of communications for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to public affairs officers in the IC. He wrote:

We anticipate the following themes:
# The intelligence enterprise has undergone exponential growth and has become unmanageable with overlapping authorities and a heavily outsourced contractor workforce.
# The IC and the DoD have wasted significant time and resources, especially in the areas of counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence.
# The intelligence enterprise has taken its eyes off its post-9/11 mission and is spending its energy on competitive and redundant programs.

In plain English, Hall sees the search for the truth as a plot to portray it unfavorably. One can hardly find a better illustration of the problem with excessive contracting: when reporters avail themselves of constitutionally protected rights to act as a watchdog on our government and its contractors, the government itself assumes that it must be an attack.

This was, however, disingenuous on Hall's part. As Arkin noted in a subsequent radio interview, "They were well aware of what we were doing, and we formally briefed them about this earlier this year. So for them to come out at the eleventh hour and somehow say that they are alarmed by what we're going to put out, to me, seems to be classic cover-your-ass."

But, ignoring for the moment that all bureaucracies wish to influence public opinion that they are indispensable, and deserving of even more public funding, Hall is actually correct, at least on the first point. It is factually inarguable that the US IC has grown by orders of magnitude.

Consider that last September then Director of National Intelligence Dennis C Blair disclosed that the United States spent $75 billion in the previous year to finance worldwide intelligence operations that employ 200,000 people. Note that even that figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counter-terrorism programs.

In contrast, the Bush administration said in 2007 that the cost of national intelligence activities in fiscal 2007 was $43.5 billion. For fiscal 2008, the figure was put at $47.5 billion. In both years, figures for the military intelligence side remained classified.

According to a US Congressional Research Service report released last month, then Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet stated on October 15, 1997, that the aggregate amount appropriated for intelligence and intelligence-related activities for FY1997 was $26.6 billion. In March 1998, Tenet announced that the FY1998 figure was $26.7 billion.

Some of the Post's findings were eye catching, others less so. The first part noted that:
# Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
# An estimated 854,000 people, nearly one and a half times as many people as live in Washington, DC, hold top-secret (TS) 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 US Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet (1.6 million square meters) 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 US 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.

The first three findings are graphic illustrations of a system that is suffering from too much input, rather like algae blooms which grow so rapidly that they consume all the oxygen in the water and end up killing a pond. A good example is the Post's detailing of newly created organizations:

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counter-terrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

In regard to clearances one could note that at the height of the Cold War that number was far less and security breaches were far less. The drive to literally upgrade all clearances to TS has in fact created a ticking security time bomb that no one has ever thought through.

Similarly, the central problem, which the Washington Post doesn't address, is that al-Qaeda and its affiliates and sympathizers are a tiny and manageable problem. Yet the apparatus that has been created is designed to meet nothing less than an existential threat.

Even at the height of the Cold War there was nothing like the post-9/11 Godzilla now in existence.

Interestingly, the Post said in the first part that its "online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track".

For those familiar with the US classification system this says volumes about its utter dysfunctional nature, in that it allows for huge amounts of information to be improperly classified, as the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy has detailed for many years.

What the Post's database also indicates is that useful intelligence can also be gathered through unclassified open source intelligence (OSINT) that does not require people with clearances. Although this ideas has gained backing the last couple of decades it is, at least when you get beyond lip service rhetoric, still very much the poor orphan within the IC.

The finding about redundancy is useful but not surprising. Anyone who read the 2004 final 9/11 Commission report found the same conclusion. As for publishing huge numbers of intelligence reports that are routinely ignored - that has been going on for as long as there has been an intelligence community.

The second part of the series deals with the use of private contractors in intelligence work. This is hardly news. In fact it is the IC counterpart of the Pentagon and State Department which uses firms like DynCorp, MPRI, or Blackwater, now called Xe Services LLC. Those same companies also work for the IC, according to the Post database.

The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. Ironically, the Post offers a more precise count of contractors in Top Secret America than the Pentagon can do with its own contractor work force. The article notes:

The government doesn't know how many are on the federal payroll. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13%, to pre-9/11 levels, but he's having a hard time even getting a basic head count.

"This is a terrible confession," he said. "I can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense," referring to the department's civilian leadership.

While much of the information in this article is useful there is little here that hasn't already been reported in the various specialized trade press. As Tim Shorrock wrote in an Atlantic Magazine blog:

Well, after three days of blanket coverage, it's safe to say the Post was right: it was indeed impossible for its team to get its arms around this story or explain the political significance of the secret world it uncovered.

The Post never delved into the troubling matter of what it means to have private, for-profit corporations and their executives operating at the highest levels of national security and sharing the government's most sensitive secrets. And much of the series was old news - fancied up with snazzy graphics and amusing photo spreads - that could have been told years ago if the paper had been up to the job of covering the massive growth of national security capitalism since 2001.

But the Post should have stopped after Part One and given it a rest. Looking beyond the numbers and the choice quotes from Bob Gates, [CIA Director] Leon Panetta and other high-ranking officials, the series is filled with the most pedestrian of reporting and reveals very little that is actually new about the privatized part of our national security state.

Worse, there is virtually nothing in the series about the deeper political questions raised by privatization, including the obvious issue of the revolving door. Unbelievably, Priest and Arkin don't even mention that president Bush's DNI [Director of National Intelligence], Mike McConnell, and President Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, were both prominent contractors before taking their jobs. Why is that relevant? Well, McConnell came directly from Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the IC's top contractors and an adviser to the NSA (and he's back at Booz now). Brennan was an executive at The Analysis Corporation, which built a key terrorist database for the National Counterterrorism Center (which Brennan used to run).

There was not even a hint that Lt Gen [Lieutenant general] James Clapper (retired), who appeared before the Senate for his DNI confirmation hearing on the second day of the series, once had close ties to major contractors. Clapper once directed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. which has extensive contracts with a satellite firm contracted by the government; after leaving the NGA, he joined its board. Nor was there mention of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the largest association for NSA and CIA contractors, for which McConnell, Brennan, and Clapper have all served as chairman. That's not part of the story? Could Clapper's experience have influenced his strong defense of contractors during his testimony? Or would mentioning such ties hurt the Post's access to the ODNI and the White House?

The Post series leave many questions unanswered. What is the split between military and intelligence contractors and subcontractors? How many intelligence contractors are working on actual intelligence activities and analysis, as opposed to just technical support? How many of the contractors doing formerly public sector jobs have actually been subjected to a dispassionate cost benefit analysis? And if they were what does it say? How badly has the proliferation of special access programs and other compartmentalized functions diminished Congressional oversight?

One way to judge the Post series is to see it as a poll on the American public's preferences. Generally, it seems, they don't want to be bothered by details. It is similar to the way they look at the military. The United States has a professionalized volunteer force. As long as there is not a draft and the budgetary demands don't seem too onerous they don't pay a lot of attention to it, even in wartime.

Similarly with regard to intelligence and counter-terrorism work Americans seem content to let the so-called experts handle it, even though it was common citizens who foiled the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Dix plot, and others. If the US public knew it alone was responsible for the country's security, 300 million pairs of motivated eyes could probably outperform the 854,000 experts with top-secret clearances discussed in the Washington Post story. Apparently the American people just want someone in government to say, ''There, there, not to worry. We're hard at work keeping the bogeymen away.''

It is exactly this public apathy which strengthens Top Secret America. Recall that in 2008 when Democrats and Republicans joined together to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program and vastly expand the NSA's authority to spy, without judicial oversight, on the communications of Americans. It was constantly claimed that the government must have greater domestic surveillance powers in order to keep America safe.

But the more secret surveillance powers we that are vested in the government, the more unsafe we become. That's because the public-private axis that is the surveillance state already collects so much information about us, our activities and our communications - so indiscriminately and on such a vast scale - that it cannot possibly detect any actual national security threats. It is unable to "connect the dots" because it is drowning in oceans of data.

The bottom line question that the Post series poses is the same one people have been asking for years about the use of private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan; namely, what is the appropriate dividing line between the public and private sector? William Arkin summarized it well in an interview on the Democracy Now radio program:

You know, one thing that we found in the evidence, Amy, is that people who are in business are in business. I'm not going to say that they're not good Americans, any less than we are, but it seems to me that their fundamental mission is to make money for their businesses. And that is not the same as being a public servant. And as you can see from our articles, we have quotes from all of the principals involved, on the record - Secretary Gates; Leon Panetta, the CIA director; the director of Defense Intelligence and the former director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair - essentially agreeing with us that this crazy, out-of-control system accreted after 9/11, and here, two years into the Obama administration, it is essentially in the same form that it was when the Bush administration left office. But there is something fundamentally wrong in America if you have people who are working in a for-profit environment caring for our national security and engaged in what we consider to be the inherent functions of government.

Will the Post series change anything? It seems unlikely. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon:

Any doubt about whether there'd be any meaningful (or even cosmetic) changes as a result of the Post expose (it was really more a compilation of already known facts) was quickly dispelled by the reaction of the political class: not just one of indifference, but outright contempt for the concerns raised by this story. On Tuesday - 24 hours after the first installment appeared - the Senate's Homeland Security Intelligence Committee removed a provision from the Intelligence Authorization Act which would have provided some marginally greater oversight over the government's secret intelligence programs, because Obama was threatening to veto any bill providing for such oversight.

Then, Obama's nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, Retired Lieutenant general James Clapper, all but laughed at the Post's work, dismissing it during his Senate confirmation hearing as "sensationalism," praising the bureaucratic redundancies as "competitive analysis," and insisting that the National Security and Surveillance State are perfectly "under control". The Post's Jeff Stein today documents how congressional Democrats can barely rouse themselves to the pretense that they intend to do anything to impose any restraints or accountability on Top Secret America. And it was revealed this week by McClatchy that our vaunted "withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq" will be accomplished only by assembling a privatized militia that will serve as the State Department's 'army in Iraq' long after our actual army withdraws."


David Isenberg is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a US Navy veteran, and the author of a new book, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. The views expressed are his own. His e-mail is sento@earthlink.net.

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Vast Intelligence Buildup Is To Oil Pentagon War Machine

August 1, 2010

in Analysis,Intelligence

By Sherwood Ross

The Washington Post’s revelations re the amazing growth of the U.S. intelligence community since 2001—so that we now have 1,271 agencies employing more than 854,000 payrollers—makes no sense, until one recognizes that this vast development must be for offensive, not defensive, purposes. The explosion in the spy budget from $30 billion to $75 billion since 9/11 is perplexing until you realize it only parallels what is happening across the broad spectrum of the military-industrial complex. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look, American militarism is on the march like a thousand Sousa bands blaring at once. According to a report of the Stockholm Internatonal Peace Research Institute, U.S. military spending for 2009 accounted for 43% of the world total, followed by China, with 6.6%; France, 4.2%; and U.K. with 3.8%

Where the U.S. allocated “only” $272-billion for “defense” in fiscal year 2000, today’s “defense” budget is $711 billion. The U.S. Navy, for example, is larger than the next 11 navies of the world combined. At the same time, spending on research involving biological warfare has zoomed steadily since 9/11 to a cumulative total exceeding $50 billion even though no nation poses such a threat to the U.S., and even though the deadly anthrax attacks of October, 2001, emanated not from the Middle East but from Ft. Detrick, Md., a base whose operations are run by the Pentagon, not Osama bin Laden. Again, illustrating USA’s aggressive priorities, the National Institutes of Health of Bethesda, Md., is now spending more money on biological warfare—-which killed a total of five Americans in the last decade—than it spends on research to prevent ordinary flu, which does kill 36,000 Americans every year. To its credit, Moscow shuttered its germ warfare ops years ago. Recall, too, that when the Pentagon’s snoops got to Iraq, they found Saddam Hussein but they couldn’t find a single germ. So what’s the big buildup for?

At any given time, the Pentagon has about $1 trillion or more in ongoing research to refine existing, (example: nuclear bombs) and to create new, (example: robots) killing machines to dominate the planet militarily. The vast intelligence apparatus The Post uncovered (The National Security Agency alone is sifting through more than 1.7 billion telephone calls and e-mails daily), makes no sense when the only enemies are a handful of shoe bombers. It makes perfect sense, though, when the Pentagon is intimidating the world by ringing it with 800 bases in 130 countries, and when the intelligence build-up is companion to the military build-up. Thus it was the U.S. eavesdropped on the private telephone conversations of high United Nations officials then debating whether to support the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. That’s not using intelligence for defense.

In an article on the Middle East wars, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times July 25th quotes historian David Kennedy of Stanford as saying: “The army is at war, but the country is not. We have managed to create and field an armed force that can engage in very, very lethal warfare without the society in whose name it fights breaking a sweat.” The result, he said, is “a moral hazard for the political leadership to resort to force in the knowledge that civil society will not be deeply disturbed.” Precisely!

Quoted in the New York Times of the same day, Stephen Daggett, a writer for the Congressional Research Service, said, “You think of war as not being the usual state.” That may well be true of many a republic, but it is not true of an empire, particularly the American Empire. According to the historian Edward Gibbon, the Roman emperor Aurelian, embroiled in numerous wars, complained in a private letter, “Surely, the gods have decreed that my life should be a perpetual warfare.” Of course, it need not have been thus except that Aurelian felt obliged to keep his foot on the neck of Rome’s subject countries. It need not be thus for America, either.


Sherwood Ross worked in the U.S. civil rights movement and reported for major dailies and wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for good causes. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

[Deathaniel]

It's size and scope is so large to make finding out what it's doing too difficult. But it's real agenda is to be bunker building and resource stashing to prepare, and in trade for keeping there mouth shut, many of the employee will be "saved".
it's second mission is to spread dis info, and to keep america looking outside for terror when it's within the shores the worst enemy of the american people.

[h3rm35]

Are you talking about the Washington Post or the Intelligence community? I don't think either is involved in bunker building or stashing.

[Deathaniel]

(08-03-2010 06:57 PM)h3rm35 Wrote:  Are you talking about the Washington Post or the Intelligence community? I don't think either is involved in bunker building or stashing.

intelegence apparatus!

really....?

what do you think there wasting all that revenue on and why the huge maze to trace it if not for things that r to be kept out of the general knowledge of the public. I mean there r other projects, advanced weaponery, some sciences also, but the majority is to prepare, and to consolidate power

[h3rm35]

That's more the realm of DHS, (specifically FEMA,) and the armed forces, and possibly the secret service. The intelligence infrastructure has other things to worry about, like collecting data on private citizens that are building bunkers and caching supplies.

[Deathaniel]

(08-03-2010 07:20 PM)h3rm35 Wrote:  That's more the realm of DHS, (specifically FEMA,) and the armed forces, and possibly the secret service. The intelligence infrastructure has other things to worry about, like collecting data on private citizens that are building bunkers and caching supplies.

you make it sound like DHS is different then the intelligence end...?

one thing this report makes very clear, i had to read it as 2 of my friends wanted my opinion, is that the size is so big and they may only have uncovered the public face of it! It's no coincidence just as DHS isn't that these gov entities have been formed so close to the time when the gov had to step up it's hibernation program, and that the sheeple r beginning to become more aware.

It's all inter connected

[h3rm35]

Well, DHS doesn't contain the NSA, CIA, NRO or DIA, so yeah, they are different. many of the DHS' sub-catagories have intelligence branches, but they often don't play nicely with others, and they certainly don't have much to do with manufacturing physical safety structures.

It seems like you're kind of missing the point of everything posted before you chimed in, and throwing the thread off-topic.