From: Tsegai Emmanuel (emmanuelt40@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 19 2010 - 22:00:42 EDT
'Top Secret America' Washington Post Investigation Reveals Massive,
Unmanageable, Outsourced US Intelligence System
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/19/top_secret_america__washington_post
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/19-3
Published on Monday, July 19, 2010 by Democracy Now!
'Top Secret America' Washington Post Investigation Reveals Massive,
Unmanageable, Outsourced US Intelligence System
by *Democracy Now!*<http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/19/top_secret_america__washington_post>
An explosive investigative series published in the *Washington Post* today
begins, "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." Among the findings: An estimated 854,000 people hold
top-secret security clearances. More than 1,200 government organizations and
nearly 2,000 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism,
homeland security and intelligence in 10,000 locations. We speak with one of
the co-authors of the series, Bill Arkin.
*AMY GOODMAN:* "Top Secret America." That’s the title of an explosive
investigative series published in the *Washington Post* this morning that’s
already creating a firestorm on Capitol Hill. It starts, quote, "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."
Some of the findings of the two-year investigation include more than 1,200
government organizations and nearly 2,000 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 one-and-a-half times as many as live in Washington, DC—hold
top-secret security clearances. Many security and intelligence agencies do
the same work, creating redundancy and waste.
The series by *Washington Post* reporters Dana Priest and Bill Arkin
includes an online searchable database and locator map. PBS *Frontline* is
producing an hour-long documentary on the investigation that will run in
October. This is its trailer.
*NARRATOR: *You think you know America. But you don’t know Top Secret
America. We’re all aware that there are three branches of government in the
United States. But in response to 9/11, a fourth branch has emerged. It is
protected from public scrutiny by extraordinary secrecy. Top Secret America.
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* This is a closed community. And since 9/11, it’s become
even more so.
*DANA PRIEST:* The money spigot was just opened after 9/11, and nobody dared
say, "I don’t think we should be spending that much."
*NARRATOR:* It has become so big, and the lines of responsibility are so
blurred, that even our nation’s leaders don’t have a handle on it. Where is
it? It’s being built from coast to coast, hidden within some of America’s
most familiar cities and neighborhoods—in Colorado, in Nebraska, in Texas,
in Florida, in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Top Secret America includes
hundreds of federal departments and agencies operating out of 1,300
facilities around this country. They contract the services of nearly 2,000
companies. In all, more people than live in our nation’s capital have
top-secret security clearance.
*DANA PRIEST:* It’s, again, the size, the lack of transparency and the cost.
And if we don’t get it right, the consequences are gigantic.
*AMY GOODMAN:* That was *Washington Post* writer Dana Priest, the trailer
from the upcoming PBS *Frontline* documentary on "Top Secret America" that
features Priest and Bill Arkin.
The investigative series is already creating waves in the intelligence
community. More than two weeks ago, the director of communications for the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Art House, sent a memo to
public affairs officers in the intelligence community warning about the
series. He wrote, quote, "This series has been a long time in preparation
and looks designed to cast the [intelligence community] and the [Department
of Defense] in an unfavorable light. We need to anticipate and prepare so
that the good work of our respective organizations is effectively reflected
in communications with employees, secondary coverage in the media and in
response to questions," he wrote.
Well, Bill Arkin is the co-author of the piece. He’s joining us now from the
offices of the *Washington Post* in Washington, DC.
Welcome to *Democracy Now!*, Bill. Why don’t you first lay out the scope of
this series and why you started this two years ago?
*WILLIAM ARKIN: *Well, two years ago, Dana and I got together, and we were
actually just talking to each other about various things that we were
working on, and we realized very quickly that we were looking at something
that was very similar and that we had both detected in our long years of
work in the national security world that something had been created since
9/11 that wasn’t normal, that wasn’t on the books, that looked like it was a
gigantic superstructure on top of regular government. And we started our
investigation to try to figure out what it is that we were looking at, and
here we are two years later revealing our conclusions.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Talk about what those conclusions are. What did you find,
Bill?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* Well, really, the most significant thing that we found,
Amy, is not that the intelligence agency or the vast homeland security
apparatus does work in this field and that is—and that they are engaged in
counterterrorism. Really the most significant finding, to me, is the number
of private companies in America who have been enlisted in the war on
terrorism and who have now become an intrinsic part of government, really
where the line is blurred between government and private sector. And the
fact that there are almost 2,000 companies that do top-secret work in—for
the intelligence community and the military is not only surprising to me as
someone who actually put together the data, but it really asks some
fundamental questions about the nature of government and the nature of
accountability.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Talk about these 2,000 companies.
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* Well, you know, it’s funny. We think of the
military-industrial complex in a sort of old-fashioned way still. In fact,
we don’t even have an appropriate word to describe what this enterprise is
today, and we’ve struggled ourselves to try to figure that out. You know,
the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era was one that produced
massive amounts of capital goods for the military—bombers, missiles, nuclear
weapons, etc. But today’s national security establishment really values
information technology more than it values weapons. And really, one of the
things that was most surprising to us, but maybe not so surprising given the
nature of society, is that a half of the companies in this particular area
are really IT companies, information technology companies, and support
companies.
The domination of this world of top-secret contractors over the traditional
world of the military-industrial complex is huge. And we see very clearly
that the megacorporations which have always been the powerhouses in the
defense industry—Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics—they are moving more and
more of their business from production to the provision of services—that is,
providing staffing for the government. And so, what you see is that we are
increasingly a national security establishment that’s producing paper rather
than producing weapons. And the question is, with the production of all that
paper, whether or not we have either an effective counterterrorism operation
or whether or not we’re even safer.
*AMY GOODMAN:* So, what about the privatization of top-secret information or
the people around the country who have access to top-secret information,
especially when they’re working in a private corporation?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* 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.
*AMY GOODMAN:* I mean, it is amazing that there are more people who have
top-security clearance in this country than live in Washington, DC—more than
850,000 people.
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* Well, it is. It’s a good comparison. But I also think that
what we find is that, more and more, Washington is not just the hub of
government, but it is also the hub of this sort of intelligence information
enterprise. You see gigantic companies like SAIC and Northrop Grumman moving
their headquarters from California to the Washington, DC metropolitan area,
and you know that with that comes not only thousands of workers and
thousands of people whose job it is to secure contracts to do government
work, but also the vast infrastructure that is required in order to secure
the secrets and to do all of those things that are necessary in order to be
in this hidden world. And so, more and more is being concentrated in
Washington. And that’s undeniable. We show it very clearly in our series,
and the data really backs it up. And I think it’s probably part of why
there’s such an enormous groundswell throughout the United States that is so
anti-Washington these days.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Bill Arkin, what’s a Super User?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* Well, what we discovered in the course of our investigation
is that not only are there top secrets, but there are various compartments
above the level of top secret which are utilized by each of the intelligence
agencies and the military commands to compartment what they do. And
intrinsically, that’s supposed to be to protect information, but in reality,
what it does is it keeps programs from being revealed to other agencies. And
in theory, above it all is supposed to be the Director of National
Intelligence, an office created in 2004 to finally solve the problems of
9/11. But what we found was that even the Director of National Intelligence
and even the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, the top
intelligence official in the government, that they don’t have full
visibility on each other’s programs, and they don’t have full visibility on
everything even within their own agency.
And there’s this thing called Super Users, people who are designated
specially who have the ability to reach into all of the programs of all of
the government. They actually have special logins. They actually have
special computers. And there’s only a few dozen of them, as far as we can
determine, throughout the entire government, only a half-dozen or so in the
Defense Department and only a half-dozen in the Director of National
Intelligence. And we’ve spoken to some of those Super Users who themselves
say, "I don’t have enough hours in the day to look at all the programs of
the US government. I don’t have enough—I don’t have enough time to read all
of the material that I am authorized to read." And so, you can really see in
a very vivid way the dysfunction of government through this little anecdote.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Bill Arkin, talk about the warning, the letter that was sent
around to the intelligence community from Art House—and explain who he
is—warning them of this series of pieces that you and Dana Priest are doing.
*WILLIAM ARKIN: *Well, let me just make it clear, Amy, we’ve been working on
this for two years. We’ve been engaged in interviewing people from the
government and inside this world for two years. We’ve conducted over a
thousand interviews, talked to hundreds of people, many multiple times. 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. I can’t take it in any other way,
because we ourselves have gone through a massive internal review process,
both fact checking and also looking at anything that could be detrimental to
the national security interest and to the national interest, and I’m
completely confident that we’ve done a rigorous job. I’m completely
confident, through the use of numerous outside counsels at the *Washington
Post*, people who are insiders to the system, helping us to make sure that
we were able to produce the most granular picture we possibly could of this
gigantic organization, but yet at the same time not put anybody’s life at
risk. And I have to say at this point, I feel like the *Washington Post *has
a better understanding of this overall problem than the government does.
*AMY GOODMAN:* What is it they did not want you to print, Bill?
*WILLIAM ARKIN: *Well, they always don’t want you to do whatever it is
that’s going to bring them—you know, that’s going to disrupt their day. You
know, the government, we asked them repeatedly to give us specifics, to tell
us what it is that they didn’t want us to show. And only one government
agency was actually able to come back to us and specifically explain to us
why they didn’t want us to reveal something, and they made a reasonable
argument to the editors, and the editors decided that we wouldn’t.
This is such a rich area that we felt that really to diminish it by somehow
not looking at these requests from the government seriously was a mistake.
We’re giving you information on 1,931 corporations, on 1,271 government
entities across forty-five different departments and agencies. I mean, this
is an enormous amount of information. And Secretary Gates himself said to us
in an interview that he can’t even get this type of information about his
own office and who contracts all of the contractors within his own office.
People recognize that this is a problem, and I think that the *Washington
Post *should really be given an enormous amount of credit for putting the
resources into this over a two-year period in order to present something
that I hope will be the foundation of a new national debate about this whole
question.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Bill Arkin, what’s Liberty Crossing?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* Liberty Crossing is the name, the nickname, for the new
complex of buildings that has gone up in McLean, Virginia, that is home to
the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA’s National Counterterrorism
Center, other counterterrorism task forces, and the National
Counterproliferation Center. We highlight the buildings around Washington
that have been created since 9/11, because we thought that it was a very
tangible representation of government. It’s often hard to really talk about
government in terms of money, because the billions, after a while, begin to
just glaze over. But we thought—you know, our approach was going to be, we
know that everything that happens happens somewhere, and we’re going to find
out where it happens. And lo and behold, as we began to map this alternative
geography of America, one of the things we discovered was that these guys
have been on a fabulous building spree since 9/11. There have been over
thirty-three buildings in the Washington, DC area alone, encompassing 17
million square feet, which is four times the size of the Pentagon, and there
are more underway. The NSA and others are building and planning to build
even more office space. So the reality is that—I think in my research I
found that there was only one civilian agency that’s had the privilege of
building a new headquarters since 9/11 in Washington, and that’s the
Department of Transportation. But this is a very tangible way of seeing this
in your backyard, in reality, in a real physical location.
And one of the phenomena that is also associated with 9/11 is that these
locations, like Liberty Crossing, are undisclosed locations, meaning you
can’t look them up in a phone book. It has a cover address. It’s not
publicly bragged about, in terms of where it is, although it’s obvious where
it is to anyone who goes by. And that in itself is sort of an odd
manufacture from 9/11, which is that these government agencies, on their
own, with really no consideration of national security, can just decide
what’s going to be disclosed, what’s going to be undisclosed. And as far as
I can see, it’s random to the agency and its power, and it has nothing to
actually do with the security of the buildings or the people who work inside
them.
*AMY GOODMAN:* The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the new $1.8
billion headquarters, the fourth-largest federal building in the area, in
Springfield, right near Dulles Airport?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* No, in Springfield, Virginia, it’s down south near Fort
Belvoir. This is a gigantic facility that’s going to—that’s going up right
now. It’s going to house 8,500 workers of the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency. I mean, they are going to leave their older buildings
that are scattered throughout Washington. But you know what? They’re going
to be in well-appointed offices, and they’ll be in one facility in
Washington, and they will obviously, I assume, be able to do their work
better. But it’s just one of many. It’s just one of many agencies that
probably most Americans have never heard of within the national security and
intelligence establishment. And as we found, you know, there are thirty-nine
new construction starts this year alone nationwide of buildings going up for
various pieces of the intelligence, homeland security and military
communities.
*AMY GOODMAN: *The growth of the military budget, Bill Arkin, since 9/11?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* Well, you know, it’s hard to say even what we spend on
national security anymore, Amy. I guess we say we spend a half-a-trillion
dollars now on national security. But with supplemental budgets and secret
budgets and all that, I mean, it’s really impossible to be able to put a
true figure on it. And more importantly, it’s really impossible to gauge
where this money is actually going and how effective it is. We’ve talked to
people on the Hill who have said to us that the budget documents get thinner
and thinner as the budget gets bigger and bigger. There’s no way that
Capitol Hill has the resources or the ability to oversee all of this
activity. And all sorts of workarounds and devices have been created since
9/11 to essentially put as much as possible into secret programs or
off-the-books programs so that they’re beyond scrutiny. Maybe there’ll be
eight people in the Congress who have the authority to see the information,
but, you know, that’s not oversight as it’s written in the Constitution.
Those are people who are co-opted into the system. And I think that really
this is an issue that we, as Americans, need to ponder, that we have created
a government apparatus that really does not comply with our very precept of
the balance of powers. And that’s something that I hope that our series will
provoke Congress to take a hard look at, in terms of thinking about better
ways in which it can exercise its oversight responsibilities over the
executive branch.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Bill, you’ve been doing this kind of work for years. What
were you most shocked by in this latest investigation?
*WILLIAM ARKIN:* I remember having a conversation with Dana, my writing
partner, in the summer of 2009. We had sort of started by looking at the
government and then shifted our attention to looking at the contracting
base. And I said, "Wow! There’s 200 companies that do top-secret work for
the government." And now we’re at 2,000. I mean, it is the sheer magnitude
of it, Amy, that is stunning. And to me, you know, it’s not that there might
not be redundancies that are necessary or that there might not be overlap
which is necessary and disparate departments doing disparate things.
And many of the conclusions that we draw, I think, are ones that your
viewers and listeners would accept readily and are part of their normal
discussions of government. But the truth is that no one really has a handle
on it all. No one really does. We’ve talked to the people at the highest
level. We’ve talked to the principals involved, and they have all readily
admitted that, yes, this *ad hoc* crazy system was created after 9/11. We
threw money at the problem. We did it the American way, Admiral Blair said
to us. You know, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. I mean, ha ha,
but the truth of the matter is that now we’re two years into the Obama
administration, and the basic system really has not been reformed at all.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Lay out for us what we will see over the next two days—this
is a three-part series—and also the database that you have collated. What is
online at *washingtonpost.com*<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/>
[1]?
*WILLIAM ARKIN: *Well, this is a very rich digital journalism project. I
would almost go as far to say that this is a digital product with a small
print component to it. As much as the *Washington Post* has allocated five
pages to the newspaper today to our first in this series, the online
presentation includes a link analysis application, which will allow 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 that we discuss in the article
series and look at who they work for and some of their locations. There’s
also a mapping application that allows you to delve into the presence of Top
Secret America in your 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.
So we’ve provided, as is the nature of the internet, the actual backup
material to do it. But it wasn’t a second thought to the stories. It wasn’t
like we wrote stories and then said, "Let’s put a web presentation
together." From the very inception of this project, we have worked in unison
with the website, and we’ve had a team of over thirty people working with
us, and that’s an enormous amount of resources these days in the mainstream
media, to be able to have really what we consider to be the future of
investigative journalism displayed in these various multimedia ways with
documentary footage, with photo galleries, with a database that’s
searchable. We have a Facebook page. And there is a URL, *
topsecretamerica.com* <http://www.commondreams.org/www.topsecretamerica.com>
[2], where you can see our blog that’ll launch today and that we’ll be
starting to write on on Thursday, as well as online discussions and other
comments and commentary from our readers.
*AMY GOODMAN:* Well, Bill, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
Bill Arkin, a reporter for the Washington Post, co-authored this
investigative series that has just been released today in the Washington
Post called "Top Secret America." We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.
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