The Post 9/11 Industrial Security Complex

“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.” – A hidden world, growing beyond control, by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin

SecDef Gates says in the article that he doesn’t believe the system has become too big, but “getting the precise data is sometimes difficult.” Others adamantly disagree.

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

It’s also really hard to imagine four-star commanders not having security clearances to know what’s going on around them, as Priest and Arkin report in their wide-ranging must read investigative project.

It opens up the door for conservatives to make their usual case that not only has the federal government become too large, but since 9/11 it’s even more dysfunctional. But neoconservatives are supported by the new 9/11 industrial security complex. Democrats like Rep. Barney Frank, as well as Tea Party leader Rep. Ron Paul have already asked for defense cuts, but will they take on this latest instance of security overreach?

CIA director Leon Panetta said something very simple and direct:

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.”

It began with Homeland Security, which seemed like a good idea after 9/11. But what’s resulted according to an investigative piece by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin is a massive, bloated, budget busting behemoth over which no one has complete control.

* 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.

Former DNI director Dennis Blair, after he resigned nailed the country’s mentality after 9/11: “The attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Everyone remembers when U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly blew away 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded 30. As Priest and Arkin report, none of what was known about Hasan reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army.

… Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. [...]

Your tax dollars inaction.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred. “There are so many people involved here,” NCTC Director Leiter told Congress. “Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. “But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”

After 9/11, talking to many people, including Kirsten Breitweiser, who had become an expert on the missed clues that led to the tragedy and whose husband died on that day, I heard something similar that was also reported in the news. “Everyone had the dots to connect, but…“ All these years later we’ve most assuredly expanded our information gathering ability, but the haunting fact that “everyone has the dots to connect,” but it’s still not being done rings out.

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn’t the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. “We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. “Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

Given today’s politics, however, and the lack of congressional oversight on the Executive Branch, but also the knee jerk political forces on proving who can be stronger on national security, it’s doubtful that our elected representatives have the fortitude to do what’s needed.

On “Morning Joe” today, Mike Barnicle went out of his way to say “boys and girls out there… it’s not a blog, it’s a newspaper story.” That is correct and it’s a damn important story. But Mr. Barnicle should remember that new media sites like mine and many others got the Iraq war story correct, while most of our newspapers were suckered. How many lives paid for that one? Our newspaper op-ed pages tilt right, while new media offers must read balance; the Post being an example, who continually beats the drum on Iran. I mention this, because the Priest-Arkin piece represents the budget needed to investigate what’s going on around us, which simply shouldn’t only be done by traditional, old media, because it doesn’t reach the numbers a site like Huffington Post does. It’s a case for more investment in new media, because it remains the future.

So, the main job our government is charged to do remains overdone, yet undone.

Are you feeling safer yet?

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