Since 9/11, the number of newly classified documents has totaled 23 million; not surprisingly, it has become more difficult to learn the extent of our intelligence efforts. America's 'War on Terror' has become a multi-billion-dollar terrorism-industrial complex. Nobody knows how much it costs, how many it employs. Since 9/11, 33 large office complexes for top secret intelligence work have been completed in the D.C. area - the equivalent of nearly three Pentagons. More than 250,000 contractors (854,000 total) are working on top secret programs; the thought was that they would be less expensive - wrong; a large number were recruited from existing government intelligence employment, at much higher salaries. (A 2008 study by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29% of intelligence agency workforces, but cost 49% of their personnel budgets. Secretary Gates said federal workers cost 25% less than contractors.) More than a thousand agencies have been created. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies (about 800 doing nothing but IT) work on counter-terrorism programs, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations in the U.S. Many do the same work - eg. 51 organizations and military commands in 15 cities track money to/from terrorist networks. The NSA intercepts and stores 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, etc. each day. Dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks, however, cannot interact with one another. Sixty classified analytic Web sites were recently still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. There is no mechanism to insure that everybody doesn't produce the same thing, gravitating to the lowest-hanging fruit. Findings are shared by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports/year - a volume so large than many are routinely ignored; high-level managers rely on personal briefers to help summarize the material. We've recreated a problem identified as a main cause of 9/11 - lack of information-sharing.
Secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects, according to one senior intelligence official Whether all these efforts have made us safer or not is impossible to determine, and there is no known assessment mechanism. What is clear, however, is that it thwarted neither the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead (Hasan had exchanged e-mails with a known radical cleric in Yemen), nor the Christmas Day bomb attempt (stopped by an alert passenger). Further, the new agencies and added staff, mountains of data, computers, and technology had little to do with bin Laden's killing - this was accomplished by a small team that had been tracking him for nearly ten years. Interrogating a prisoner eventually led to finding bin Laden's courier, and it was mostly routine from there on.
Within that new bureaucracy, the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has grown more than tenfold (from 1,800 to 25,000) since 9/11, while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA manages. The unit takes orders directly from the president of secretary of defense and is overseen by a military-only chain of command. JSOC's core includes the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron, the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Capabilities include the ability to retrieve and examine items captured in raids - thumb drives, cellphones, CDs, and computers.
'Top Secret America' is not just about massive waste of dollars on a security state that does more harm than good. It is also about loyal employees upset about what they are asked to do - often illegal and dysfunctional. The term 'wasteful redundancy' occurs often in the book.
JSOC is not immune from controversy - reports have accused its members of assaulting and torturing prisoners and hiding them in secret facilities, detaining mothers, wives, and daughters when they couldn't find the men they were looking for. Thirty-four were disciplined disciplined in a one-year period alone. Civilians have also been killed or wounded - its success in targeting the right homes, businesses and individuals has only been about 50%.
The CIA has also undergone a transformation since 9/11, increasingly focused on finding targets to capture or kills. The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001, but the CIA doesn't even acknowledge the drone program. Regardless, its 118 strikes last year were outnumbered 'many times' by instances of providing tips to foreign partners.
'Top Secret America,' however, does not cover all the costs of added security since 9/11. It's estimated that twice as many guards (more than a million) now patrol public spaces, and the cumulative increase in Homeland Security expenditures since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars - again without any sort of real cost-benefit analysis. Then there's the trillions more spent in the Dept. of Defense supposedly on the 'War on Terror' in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bottom-Line: America is now in a perpetual state of yellow alert. 'Top Secret America' documents innumerable examples of new redundancies created as a result. The inevitable result is increased time spent on political infighting and further harm to our economy. Worst of all, we've taken no actions since then to reduce the motivations of potential terrorists - we continue to provide blatant one-sided support for Israel and its abuses of Palestinians, just recently played a lead role in the overthrow of another Arab state, Libya, continue to wage war in and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, frequently bomb Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, while also threatening Iran and Syria.
