Why This Gigantic “Intelligence” Apparatus? Follow the Money
By Robert Higgs • Tuesday July 20, 2010 11:56 AM PDT • 42 Comments
The Washington Post published yesterday the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic U.S. apparatus of “intelligence” activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.
Among Priest and Arkin’s findings from a two-year study are the following:
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.
[We] 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.
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.
According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 “the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.” I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.
As Priest and Arkin report, “The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that “the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.” To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it’s not as if they were spending their own money.
Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers’ money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It’s loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.
And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one. It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade—after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI “captures” the unfortunate victims of the government’s entrapment.)
So, the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small—not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent. Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can’t be done won’t be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.
The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale—youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places—indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside. That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part’s “findings” to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers’ money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it—and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.
What we see here is not really an “intelligence” or counterterrorism operation at all. It’s a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to “fight terrorism.”
Tags: Defense, Imperialism, Peace, Politics, Power, Propaganda, Surveillance, Terrorism, The State, War 
Let’s not also forget that the genuine attacks are done to provoke an overreaction on part of the victim’s authorities. Other than that little side caveat, brilliant analysis.
The_Orlonater | Jul 20, 2010 | Reply
While the rip-off motive is no doubt strong there is also the justification motive. Having spent billions of dollars attempting to defend a country and failed, the only possible way out is to claim the need to spend more. If you fail having spent a $100B and someone comes along and says “Actually you should have spent $20B and run your organisation right.” then you’re out of a job, and not likely to get a new one. What you need then is someone to come along and say “You should have spent $1T.”. Justification of past actions is the root of almost all government action.
Michael | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
From the viewpoint of the political class, the war on terror is perfect. Lots of money and no real results with an indefinite time line allowing rewarding of friends and punishing of political enemies.
As part of the bread and circus of our presently incompetent government, all these secret programs don’t allow the taxpayers to see what is going on. As someone with an ex-top secret clearance, a huge amount of the classification is just to cover up the level of incompetency in the organizations.
With our opponents not even having a decent global communications or intelligence systems, all the secrecy is only to keep us from knowing what is happening. The bad guys are only interested in local level intelligence, which doesn’t require a huge investment or access to all the paper generated by 75 billion. dollars.
Dallas | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
The minute they actually spent money so that they actually had young analysts who could speak fluent Arabic, Farsi, and Pashtun, for one thing, they’d very quickly learn that there’s no threat; underwear bombers and incompetent propane-tank wielding would-be Times Square bombers are about it, and that’s not much to spend a trillion dollars over. And second, “they” would pretty much pretty soon be out of a job because “they”—the current crop in charge in the Intel game—don’t have that talent. So that’s why they don’t put out a billion or two for language studies.
Duglarri | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
Well, one book says money is the root of all evil, or words to that effect. Were fiat money not used, no real funds would be available for such abuse. Put real hard money back into the hands of citizens and a completely different world order would result.
alzurzin | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
Of course! And your point is....?
Neil Kitson | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
The love of money is the root of all evil.
jd | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
Gotta wonder if the AmeroCONNED Sheeple will ever realize that this is a government of the criminals, by the crimainals, for the crimainals and is the most successful criminal enterprise the world has ever known.
Bob Bogus | Jul 21, 2010 | Reply
FOLLOW THE MONEY, the Treasury bond proceeds used to fund the Federal deficit goes to the Pentagons [DHS] and spy agencies. 400 lobbyists in D.C. in 1980, 45,000 today all creating and chasing the Federal deficit funds. Reagan initiated the huge deficits to fund the Pentagon and spy agencies. Using 9/11 as the excuse Bush exploded the deficit even creating the DHS which purpose is purely for graft and corruption which is facilitated in the private sector. Just following the money from the deficit funding and that the simultaneous expansion of the deficit with War spending is following the money. Republican vote 100% for the National Security Police state, have never denied a Republican President an deficit increase and now whine about the deficit which funds their National Security Police State 100% of the time. That this doesn’t make sense, protesting the deficit while voting 100% for the programs the deficit funds, is not surprising because the only sense the Republicans make is nonsense.
bogi666 | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
‘Other than that little side caveat, brilliant analysis.’ – What on earth are you talking about Orlander—it’s just bloody common sense and has been all along.
Neil Kitson is on the other hand spot on the money with ‘Of course! And your point is....?
Must be a Brit ‘cos the yanks can’t/won’t seem to work it out!
Ozymandias | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
854,000 Ivy League graduates on the government dole. Playing Stasi. Outrageous! With only an estimated 30 ‘al CIAda’ left in Afghanistan there must be very little for this secret bureaucracy to do here, but to become Masters of Invention and to turn against the American people.
Cold WInd | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Dr. Higgs,
Nice piece. Of course, the other side of the problem is the amount of domestic and international information – of whatever value – these thieves collect. At some point they’ll want to take ‘action’ on some of it – even if it’s only some hare brained idea to stop some public health problem or consumptive driving of some sort....! Or perhaps there are even more windmills abroad that we can mightily joust with.
There will be a time when some knuckle-headed group of political thieves is going to have a Lewinski moment and need to show some ‘action’ on some front.
That’s when it gets more scary than simply printing or borrowing wads of cash for Bunter and his pals from Ha’vad’s employment...!
W Baker | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Incompetent? Not hardly. I used to think that but I finally realized that these guys are actually evil geniuses. Why? Because they’ve managed to get away with it for so long and it works!
David | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
“Well, one book says money is the root of all evil”... Alzurzin
Sorry, Al, but that book says it’s the LOVE of money and not money, paper or otherwise, in and of itself that is the root of all evil.
David | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Considering that the 100 or so Israeli “art students,” who also all happened to have military training in demolitions, electronic eavesdropping, and wire tapping, etc., were rounded up for casing military and government installations, identifying security arrangements, photographing access routes, and so one, it would appear there’s much more afoot here than identifying Islamic terrorist threats. The Israeli “students,” those pesky kids, were sent home as were the “five dancing Israelis,” Mossad agents all, who had the prescience to set up cameras atop their communications van before the first plane struck the Trade Center. There’s also the fact that WTC7 was brought down by controlled demolition at 5:20 p.m. despite no NYC or federal government units having placed the cutter charges on the structural steel. No, there’s no desire to protect Americans from terrorism at all since even Dr. Alan Sabrosky, a former head of studies at the U.S. Army War College, has said our military has incontrovertible evidence that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by Israel and with the complicity at the highest levels of our own government, and in particular, the office of Vice President. On the other hand, development of horrific weapons of crowd control by our DHS, which can only be intended for use against Americans, may be keeping many of these bureaucrats busy.
Dan | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
The military-security-industrial-Congressional complex is just a mechanism for the governing/political class to rip off the American people. The DC/Beltway region is an island of prosperity in a sea of economic spoilation.
H L Mencken said the truth long ago:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Tim | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
So gentle souls, just where did all these charming ‘Intelligence Agents’ get their training? Oh, they were born doing stupid skullduggery? Charming thought..back of the class!
Davi Pizota | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
A previous comment mentioned the evils of fiat money. I agree. The virtue of a commodity-based monetary system is that establishes a political economy that is more honest, sustainable, and limits the recklessness of politicians. This why politcians hate the gold standard. The Fed is the empire’s money machine.
Tim | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
for the true believers;
9/11 an inside job? wow! what a massive conspiracy involving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, all of whom have somehow managed to keep their mouths shut.
news flash – people can’t keep their mouths shut.
which is why conspiracies of three or four people suffer a much greater likelihood of going supernova than a conspiracy of just two.
a conspiracy of 100s? little chance of succeeding and no chance of keeping it quiet.
human nature is both gullible and suspicious.
sometimes the two get out of whack.
hear the one about the fake moon landing?
a NASA pr stunt to polish its image and increase its funding. in fact the moon really doesn’t exist any more. UFOs were spotted hauling it away just yesterday.
honest.
lawrence fitton | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
In short, counter-terrorism is another racket. Of course, those who had doubts about the events of.... suspected this all along.
Arindam | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Apart from government employment, now that the factories are gone what can we do with all of those 20 something graduates of Harvard and Yale? Is this worse than unemployment? They can’t all be New York state public school teachers and prison guards.
Scott | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
I really wish foreigners would cease the futile attempt to prop up the dollar to keep their export-led economies from cratering. While it might result in some short-term pain for their citizens, it would expose the Ponzi scheme that is the American economy, and the sooner it comes, the sooner we can begin the recovery process.
Without a reliable lifeline from the Chinese and Japanese, our “leaders” would finally be faced with a stark choice: a) Massive spending cuts and a dismantling of the absurd empire they’ve erected; b) risk widespread revolt due to large tax increases during a recession; or c) default via money creation and the prospects of a hyperinflationary depression.
The first option is the only sane approach to what ails us, but that would mean an end to the gravy train for hundreds of thousands of lawyers, bureaucrats and other social parasites. They would rather ruin the country than do something productive for society.
Steve Hogan | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Steve, check out who has bought our bonds for the last two years, well over half are being bought by the big US banks and FRB+other central banks. It probably went something like this; “you take this bailout and buy some bonds with it and we’ll let you continue to do business in this country”. As for the FRB & other central banks, they are trapped because they all own each others debt and to not buy each others bonds would be suicide.
bro43 | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
One thing should be added:
The points being made are certainly correct, but there is one goal all these agencies are there to accomplish beyond just feeding off the trough:
Setting up a control apparatus which will help them find ways to fleece us even more than already.
No one believes the US was really spying on SWIFT for example to discover terrorists’ money transfers. But what a great way to find out which subject is hiding money from the US abroad for ex?
The Europeans have taking this to a whole new level with their stolen bank CD fencing operation (Germany, France, UK have bought stolen Swiss data, and many claim they were instigators, not just the fence).
UBS was snitched on by one of their employees, who knows how much he was offered by the US for that?
That is the real reason for this ever greater spying, to control us more, and find out ever more about us and our situation.
Looked at from that point of view, there is a very effectively camouflaged apparatus, and the enrichment of all involved as mentioned in the comments is the gravy, not the meat!
Chris | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Since obviously more than one person was involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, then by definition the U.S. government’s mendacious, self-serving, anti-historical, anti-physical law, anti-factual, and provably false official fairy tale is a conspiracy theory, as the U.S. government is putting forth a theory concerning the 9/11 attacks which involves a conspiracy.
Al-Qaeda was founded by the U.S. government and has always been a wholly-owned creature of those who control the U.S. government. Everything al-Qaeda does is designed to empower them.
The below paper, published in a peer-reviewed chemical physics journal and authored by nine scientists working in laboratories at multiple universities using state-of-the-art equipment, confirms the presence of large quantities of metal microspheres of reacted thermite, and flakes (chips) of unreacted (i.e., still active) super-thermite (also called nanothermite, which is thermite which has been made even more reactive by decreasing the thermitic particle size down to the nanometer range), in different dust samples from the collapsed World Trade Center (W.T.C.) towers collected from multiple people at different sites even before cleanup operations began. The physical and chemical properties of these microspheres and flakes were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (S.E.M.), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (X.E.D.S.), and differential scanning calorimetry (D.S.C.), among other methods.
Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley and Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”, Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol. 2 (April 2009), pp. 7-31, doi:10.2174/1874412500902010007.
Below are two other peer-reviewed papers which also pertain to the presence of large quantities of thermite in the dust of the collapsed W.T.C. towers:
Kevin R. Ryan, James R. Gourley and Steven E. Jones, “Environmental anomalies at the World Trade Center: evidence for energetic materials”, The Environmentalist, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 56-63, doi:10.1007/s10669-008-9182-4.
Steven E. Jones, Frank M. Legge, Kevin R. Ryan, Anthony F. Szamboti and James R. Gourley, “Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction”, Open Civil Engineering Journal, Vol. 2 (2008), pp. 35-40, doi:10.2174/1874149500802010035.
See also the Journal of 9/11 Studies.
In addition to the presence of large amounts of thermite in the dust of the collapsed W.T.C. buildings, another truly vital piece of evidence that provides definitive proof that the W.T.C. towers were brought down by controlled demolition are the videos of yellow-hot molten metal seen cascading off the South Tower (World Trade Center Tower 2) immediately before its collapse.
That piece of evidence isn’t merely a smoking gun: it’s a smoking nuclear cannon. Those videos, alone and by themselves, are irrefragable proof that the South Tower (at the very least) had thermite-like (“like” in the sense of producing comparable temperatures) incendiary demolition charges with the ability to easily slice through structural steel going off within it. There is no innocent explanation for what those videos record.
That is to say, the only way to get around that it is thermite which is causing that yellow-hot metal to cascade off the South Tower before its collapse would be to posit that we are seeing a different form of extremely powerful incendiary with thermite-like temperatures at work in the videos. Of which, even if true, would be every bit as much damning, since no such powerful incendiaries can be accounted for without involving a sinister intent to plant them there.
Below are videos which contain some of this footage:
“Shot from street level of South Tower collapsing”, CameraPlanet, Google Video. Also at “Shot from street level of South Tower collapsing”, CameraPlanetArchive, YouTube, September 10, 2007.
“Wtc 1, impact site close up, tower collapse close up, long shot, people shouting”, CameraPlanet, Google Video. Also at “Wtc 1, impact site close up, tower collapse close up,...”, CameraPlanetArchive, YouTube, September 10, 2007.
From the color of the yellow-hot molten metal seen cascading off the South Tower, it had to be at least over 1000 °C (as the temperature of an incandescent object is exhibited by its color), yet jet fuel burns in open air at 260-315 °C; nor do burning office, building, or plane materials impart temperatures anywhere near that hot to structural members (indeed, it would present quite a hazard if such articles were constructed with such powerful incendiaries, and so designers of such objects go out of their way to make sure that they are not). Thus, if it wasn’t molten iron from thermite that we are seeing come off the South Tower, then by necessity a reaction source with a heat intensity very much like thermite had to be present. Yet there is nothing in the U.S. government’s account that can explain such a heat source; indeed, there’s nothing innocent that could explain it, since it requires some sort of extremely powerful incendiary.
James Redford | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
Like the War On Drugs before it, the Global War On Terror is a fraud of epic proportions.
Richard Sinnott | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
If the Air Force had simply intercepted the four “hijacked” jetliners within 20 minutes of communication shutdown — something the Air Force does routinely dozens and dozens of times each year in the US without special difficulty — then there couldn’t have been those collisions with the Twin Towers or the Pentagon.
Why wasn’t that astounding faux pas investigated and fixed? (Instead, nary a peep from our “journalists” and political “leaders.”)
Because the powers-that-be wanted those particular collisions. (Excellent cover for illegally invading and occupying Islamic countries.) And because they then had a carte blanche to expand the federal regime limitlessly in the name of “security.” (Excellent cover for lining the pockets of and otherwise empowering regime cronies.)
R.P. McCosker | Jul 22, 2010 | Reply
As a former Republican, now Libertarian, I can assure you the Democrats are equally at fault. They voted for much of this crap and it continues now under Barry Soetoro (aka Obama). What we have today is NO representation except for Ron Paul and possibly two or three others. The elections are basically rigged wherein your choices, thanx to the drones in the national media, is made to appear to be the two major parties who are, in essence, a two-headed ogre that is killing our liberties.
rtaylortitle | Jul 24, 2010 | Reply
Actually, that saying about “the love of money” is one of the dumbest of all time. Can anyone think of any other motivations for evil? Lust of all kinds, jealousy, envy, religious zealotry, and blind ideology come to mind. Hatred of money might just as well be the motivator.
Glen Litsinger | Jul 24, 2010 | Reply
Thought about that, what Tim (Jul 22, 2010) found:
H. L. Mencken said the truth long ago:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
And the war on terror in Orwell’s 1984, exactly alike. To hide the empire of lies originated in WW-1, Rothschild, godfather of Zionism then and the Balfour declaration. The lies distributed by the media of then war propaganda against Germany in both wars and now probably the finance-war (FED 1913).
1984voofritz | Jul 30, 2010 | Reply