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BBC
19 July 2010
Secret US
intelligence gathering has grown so
much since 9/11 no-one knows its
exact cost, nor how many people are
involved, the Washington Post
reports. It says nearly 2,000
private companies and 1,270
government agencies are involved in
counter-terror work at 10,000
locations across the country.
The report,
Top Secret America, follows a
two-year investigation by the paper.
Officials quoted acknowledge the
system has shortcomings, but
question some of the newspaper's
conclusions.
Before the report was published,
the White House told the Washington
Post it knew about the problems
within US intelligence gathering and
was trying to fix them.
DNI criticized
The report says the growth of the
security industry - with billions of
dollars of contracts farmed out to
various government agencies and
private contractors - has resulted
in an unwieldy system lacking in
oversight and with high levels of
redundancy and waste.
According to the Washington Post:
- Some 854,000 US citizens
have the highest level of
security clearance
- A fifth of the US
government's anti-terror
organizations have been created
since the September 2001 attacks
- More than 250 security
bodies have been created or
restructured since 9/11
- More than 30 complexes with
17m sq ft of space (1.6 sq m)
have been built for top-secret
intelligence work in the
Washington area since the
attacks
- Various agencies publish so
many reports these are often
ignored by officials
Intelligence failures that
allowed the September 2001 attacks
to happen have produced the regular
refrain that the American
intelligence community had "failed
to join up the dots", says the BBC's
defense and security correspondent,
Nick Childs.
US intelligence and surveillance
systems have changed dramatically
since those attacks, with reforms -
such as the creation a Directorate
of National Intelligence to oversee
some 16 agencies in the intelligence
community - and a massive injections
of resources.
US officials insist these reforms
have led to significant
improvements.
But recent incidents - such as
the failed Detroit airliner bombing
in December and the failed Times
Square attack on New York in May -
have exposed continuing weaknesses,
and failures still to "join up the
dots", our correspondent adds.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates
said the bureaucracy of US
intelligence gathering had not
become unmanageable, but that it was
sometimes hard to get precise
information.
"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," Mr. Gates told the
newspaper.
Confirmation hearing
Last month, President Barack
Obama nominated retired Gen James
Clapper, a top Pentagon official, to
replace Adm. Dennis Blair as his
next intelligence chief.
PROFILE: GEN JAMES CLAPPER
- Vietnam War
veteran
- Retired
three-star Air Force general
- Former
director of Defence Intelligence
Agency
- Former head
of National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
- Current
Pentagon intelligence official
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Adm Blair resigned as director of
national intelligence (DNI),
apparently because of internal
administration battles.
The DNI was heavily criticised in
a report by the president's
Intelligence Advisory Board which
said it was overstaffed and
dysfunctional.
Gen Clapper faces a Senate
confirmation hearing this week at
which some of the issues raised in
the Washington Post are bound to be
aired, says our correspondent.
Top Secret America was compiled
by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest
and some two dozen reporters, and is
being published in three instalments
this week.
The Washington Post said its
investigation was based on
government documents, public records
and hundreds of interviews with
intelligence, military and business
officials and former officials.
Most of those interviewed
requested anonymity because they
were not allowed to speak publicly,
or because they feared retaliation
at work, the newspaper said.
A hidden
world, growing beyond control
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.
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