Dana Priest and William Arkin’s big blockbuster on the national security apparatus is out, with this teaser:
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.
The War on Terror, like the War on Drugs, is a growth area with unlimited potential, lots of new fiefdoms, and an endless supply of money. The mission and outcomes are secondary issues.
El Tiburon
We have always been at war with The War on Terror.
PeakVT
Imperial overreach, part 323847.
Meanwhile, at home, limited funding for our schools causes nonsense like this.
El Cid
At least in some fashion today’s governing establishment sees the value of expanded public employment.
cleek
?
surely this counts state and local, right ? there can’t be 1,200 agencies of any kind in the federal govt..
malraux
Why is it that conservatives’ favorite parts of government most resemble exactly what conservatives say is wrong with government?
Perry Como
Related.
RSR
Just wondering how the timing of this report–two years into the Obama admin–is going to affect the reception of it?
It was pretty obvious that this was occurring over the last eight years. But this report will fall hardest on the current administration, IMO.
WereBear
For conservatives, there’s always money for oppression and paranoia!
me
The layout of that story really sucks.
flukebucket
Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
roshan
I hope many folks get in on it while this is hot, just like when Java came out. Java might have cooled down in a decade or so but this has potential, like for centuries! Of course one thing will be the same, team leaders are full of shit.
Bulworth
@El Tiburon: Awesome.
Bulworth
I’m sure the teabaggers will begin protesting the tyranny and out of control spending associated with our national security state.
Corner Stone
It’s all about the grift.
If I ever thought differently I don’t any longer.
General Stuck
Not to worry, when the Chinese take over, they will convert the CIA to a fortune cookie factory.
And what a waste, all they need is a box of Cheney’s Acme Brand thumbscrews to find out what we wanna know.
Josie
@PeakVT: What causes nonsense like that is comparing testing of whole school populations from one year to the next instead of measuring the progress of each student from one year to the next. It is impossible to determine the efficacy of the system unless you see how far each individual has come from year to year, as we used to do with the California Achievement Test or the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. The test we use in Texas now and the rating system compares, for instance, the proficiency of this year’s seventh grade class with last year’s seventh grade class – apples and oranges. This could only have been dreamed up by politicians and people selling test prep materials, not by educators.
ksmiami
More men with guns and toys and an endless money spigot. What could possibly go wrong?
Bulworth
@ksmiami: True dat.
Remember November
i’m hanging in for the War on Porn, sharpening up my CV for that.
GregB
We have to give up freedom in order to save it.
bkny
this @RSR:
nothing will change from this investigation. kbr, halliburton, blackwater are still collecting hundreds of millions in war booty, er, defense/security contracts to keep the homeland secure, despite the many reports and investigations of the lies, profiteering, over-charging, rape, gun-running, electrocution-ready shower facilities, murder….
acallidryas
Well, I don’t want to defend the government’s growth and control, but that second one about clearances sounds a bit more serious than it is. Clearances are pretty much handed out for everything these days, and have been for a while. I live in DC and can’t tell you how many forms we’ve had to fill out for people getting clearances.
My husband works in IT at DoJ. All the lawyers at DoJ have top-secret clearance. All of the IT workers and contractors have to get top-secret clearance. Many of the administrative staff do. Anyone who does business with the Pentagon, Military, DoJ, FDIC, and probably almost all the other departments have to have top-secret. Boeing, Nothrup, and all the smaller groups. All their support staff, like IT and Administrative, have to have top-secret. Heck, a friend interning in communications at NASA one summer had to get a secret clearance. And I’ve never known someone to get denied. It’s silly, wastes time, and wastes a lot of money, I’ll grant you, but it’s not as serious as it sounds above. I would venture that a rather large majority of the people with top-secret clearance are in no way connected to the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, or serious security work.
celticdragonchick
The Air Force in particular has been one of the worst offenders for paranoid secrecy.
I very damned near got shot near an Air Force comm station in Georgia after I had a minor car issue and pulled overt o see what was wrong (I had to lay prone on the pavement…boot on my neck etc…and I was on public property!).
celticdragonchick
@GregB:
Yep.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Tancrudo
National Security is in a gold rush. I used to work in it, and we joked every goddamn day that “business is booming.” On the government side, career bureaucrats who know fuck-all about science or engineering are clever enough to know that they’ll advance quickly if the half-life of their fuckups is longer than the half-life of their positions. On the industry side, contractors know that bids are lies and you really do get to make it up as you go along. Nothing really has to work, because the government has little capacity for testing and so testing will be subbed out to one of your buddies (and one hand washes another). You test me this year and I’ll test you next year.
It’s a graft-a-palooza out there. No better way to make money. If you can set up a small shell company with a female minority head (try an Aleut), you can rake it in especially given contracting preferences.
Nick
The irony of this is that we liberals are (rightly) jumping all over this as a sign that the national security bureaucracy is becoming too big, too vast, too unable to control, too prone to corruption.
Yet we can’t understand why it’s hard to win an argument over whether or not the government should completely control our healthcare system or create a bureaucracy that manages million of jobs.
Mike in NC
A recent book I read claimed that in East Germany in the 1970s and 80s, one in sixty people worked as snitches for the secret police (Stasi). They couldn’t even come close to us when it comes to mindless fear and paranoia.
Corner Stone
@Nick:
Say what now?
Corner Stone
@Tancrudo:
Why would you exit this goldmine?
scav
Never fear in re: the schools. Docile tamed critters generally ain’t as clever ‘n’ cunning as their wilder brethren and thus will not require much schoolin’. Non-docile tamed critters pick up what they really need to know on the streets and from samizdat.
Tancrudo
@Josie: The big controversy here in Massachusetts is whether we should lower state standards to meet federal standards in order to receive more funding. We’re already at the top, but to participate in “Race to the Top,” we have to start moving backwards.
As far as the Vermont reorg, it’s looking like it’s becoming standard practice to blame people who work with poor kids for the educational manifestations of poverty. “Getting tough” means tearing apart poor kids’ schools every few years, firing the principals and teachers who care enough to work with them, and shuffling the kids around. Many good teachers are surely making the wise career choice to avoid schools that work with poor kids, and looking for middle-class schools where their careers will have greater stability.
It’s a classic example of unintended consequences.
Kristine
Apples and oranges, imho. With matters of “national security,”, you can invoke bin Laden and 9-11, and many folks will just shut up and let you go about your business. There’s still a lot of fear in being called unpatriotic, and if you think your job may depend on you just going along, welp? With medical care, things are more out in the open and there’s a private sector component that will always be in competition, not in cahoots.
Kristine
::reads post::
::reads it again::
::should know this by now, seeing as I’ve lived in Illinois for 20+ years, but still…::
So much for Happy Monday…
Corner Stone
This should probably go in the “Good Money after Bad” thread but anyway, if you haven’t read this article you must. It kinda fits in with this thread topic as well:
After years of rebuilding, most Afghans lack power
Kristine
John–please delete my post #33–the block quotes screwed up. When I tried to block quote properly, the quotes still moved on their own and left parts of Nick’s text out. I blame my browser, but it’s the day job one and I can’t upgrade.
@Nick
Apples and oranges, imho. With matters of “national security,”, you can invoke bin Laden and 9-11, and many folks will just shut up and let you go about your business. There’s still a lot of fear in being called unpatriotic, and if you think your job may depend on you just going along, welp? With medical care, things are more out in the open and there’s a private sector component that will always be in competition, not in cahoots.
Corner Stone
@Tancrudo:
Unintended consequences for who? And in what way?
ISTM the argument could be documented that this is the planned outcome, and not something unexpected.
PeakVT
@Nick: Yet we can’t understand why it’s hard to win an argument over whether or not the government should completely control our healthcare system
During the health care debate, nobody proposed that the government completely control our health care system. Some people proposed that the government completely control our health insurance system, which is a small, parasitic subset of our health care non-system.
It’s hard for someone to win an argument that they’re not even making.
D-Chance.
You forgot the War On Poverty, there, in your list of fiefdoms, Cole…
Nick
@Kristine:
This is already too complicated for the common person to understand.
Adam Collyer
If this is the official stance of the Obama administration (and since it’s an “anonymous source,” who knows), it’s bullshit…
You want to sarcastically issue a press release that derides Republicans for their national security issues? All for it. Go nuts. But don’t give me this nonsense that investigative reporting harms national security. You know what harms national security? The unchecked national security apparatus.
gypsy howell
Huh. You’d think for all the money we’re pouring down the shithole of our National Security State, it’d at least be generating more jobs for all of us peons.
cervantes
When 854,000 people hold top secret security clearances, there are no secrets.
Chad N Freude
@acallidryas:
Not silly, perhaps not done with adequate care. In theory, one can’t get a Secret or Top Secret clearance without a reasonably good vetting. Forms are filled out, references are checked, and records are scrutinized. It doesn’t reject everyone of bad character or malicious intent, but it’s better than nothing.
Another point: Having a clearance does not give one access to all information classified at the clearance level. There is the concept of “need to know”, and access will be denied to a cleared person if the reason for requesting access is not good enough in the eyes of the agency that owns the info. The DoJ lawyers with TS clearances can’t just walk into an Army enclave and get TS information about classified high tech stuff.
(Maybe “eyes” isn’t the best word to use in this context, but you know what I mean.)
Nick
@PeakVT:
well…those who supported single payer did. But my general point is this is why “government-controlled healthcare” or “government-run healthcare” sells so badly that we can’t even bring up single payer as an option.
Chad N Freude
Has anybody noted that all this frantic growth in the “security industry” to prevent the terrorists from winning is a clear indication that the terrorists are winning (if they haven’t already won)? The objective of terrorism is to induce fear in the population, and this industry would not be growing if the fear didn’t exist.
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”, and boy, do we ever fear fear.
Corner Stone
@Nick:
We can’t even bring up single payer because it was deliberately removed from discussion. And Medicare for All polls very well, consistently for the last 3 years:
…
The Moar You Know
@Chad N Freude: Nonsense. The “terrorists” haven’t won shit. My TV and media is still as crammed with jailbait borderline porn starlets extolling the virtues of buttsex, opiates and nudity as it ever was.
The “security industry”, on the other hand, has rolled America like a whore rolls a drunk, and they aren’t done robbing us yet – not by a longshot.
Bill Murray
@Corner Stone: So true, NCLB was pretty much designed to destroy much of public education; thus, it can’t really be said to be unintended.
Chad N Freude
@The Moar You Know: I can’t tell if you’re being serious.
Corner Stone
@The Moar You Know:
I can’t tell if you’re serious either but if so I do want to know what cable package you subscribe to.
Nick
@Corner Stone: jeez, you can at least provide a link.
and this;
Doesn’t describe single payer
and
is this new math?
The Nineteen Sixties/Seventies Is Calling...
@D-Chance.:
…And it wants its superceded budget priorities back.
(Seriously, were you asleep during the nineties welfare reform process? Have you never heard of a man called Bill Clinton? Sheesh. Smarter conservative ‘fact checkers’, please.)
Peter
@Perry Como: Maybe this is just me, but I wish WikiLeaks would stick to publishing leaked documents, and leave the writing of summer blockbuster trailers to the professionals in Hollywood.
Tancrudo
@Corner Stone: Corner Stone, I raked it in hand over fist for a decade and then quit to stay at home with kids. The racket was making me morally sick, and my wife’s much more benign career was going even better. So I’m a stay-at-home dad now and you can decrement the 854K by one.
Tancrudo
@Corner Stone: Corner, you’ve got a good point there. And kudos for being even more cynical than I am.
Yeah, it could well be a plot. As you know, the education system (elementary to university) has two functions at all times. One is to help kids get ahead. The other is to make sure they don’t. One increases social mobility and equality. The other prevents social mobility and maintains class structure. These tendencies are always present, the yin and yang of education.
I’d say unintended consequences for the teachers and the administrators both. I feel pretty comfortable saying teachers go into the business to help the children. I even think that people like Arne Duncan come up with their great schemes because they want to help the children. I’d avoid imputing bad motives when simple lack of foresight will explain the problem. I even think that a lot of the problems of the Bush era were probably caused more by incompetence than malice.
It’s just a lot harder to produce the meaningful data – that is, the corrected and balanced comparisons of apples with apples that would better demonstrate the actual effect of a given school rather than the characteristics of its population. They really should take the largest data set possible, run enough regressions to determine the average value of variables like poverty and immigration over years (y1, y2, etc) and then apply multiple weighting correctives to each student’s scores each year, before mushing the data back together to determine aggregate individual progress. But they don’t do it like this because it’s too hard. They don’t have the data. Or they don’t understand what they need to do to make it meaningful. So they try to fudge it with the crap stats they can get easily. The end result in many cases is making the problem worse by miring schools for the poor in a loop of turmoil.
But I really don’t think that Arne Duncan intends to create this impediment, let alone Barack Obama. There are certainly plenty of folks out there who got their success and want to pull the ladder up after them, but I don’t think they’re among them.
evinfuilt
@Corner Stone:
You’re right its planned. They screwed up Texas and decided to take it national.
liberty60
So I am considering a Mouse That Roared economic revitalization plan for my hometown…
Declare that it is a safe haven for the Taliban, and only the massive infusion of billions of dollars for schools, roads, bridges and medical clinics can prevent the local populace from turning against America.
Could work.
Mark S.
Can we just cross the 4th Amendment out? It’s cruel to have it in there when it obviously doesn’t mean anything. Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could tell you this isn’t the most effective way to spy on people:
Corner Stone
@Tancrudo:
I would say the foundation for destruction has been in place since before I was born. My entire life has been about public school funding and vouchers and private schools and Robin Hood funding and everything else.
IMO, it is a long waged and concerted effort to destroy both the teachers’ unions as well as the public education system.