US spying spawns a dystopian epidemic

By David Isenberg

Considering revelations in recent years ranging from renditions, the overseas Central Intelligence Agency prison system, torture during interrogations and National Security Agency wiretapping, aka "warrantless surveillance", it is difficult to claim, a-la Claude Rains in the movie Casablanca, that anyone is "shocked, shocked" to find the United States intelligence system so cumbersome that oversight is virtually impossible.

According to a Washington Post report last month, in a three-part series titled "Top Secret America" by Dana Priest and William Arkin, following a two-year investigation, "The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it's fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping citizens safe."

The fact that the Post described a bureaucracy resembling the Oceanian province of Airstrip One in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four - a world of perpetual war and pervasive government surveillance that allows the party to manipulate and control the public - is just icing on the cake for those who relish irony.

That there is an alternative "Top Secret America" spread around the country is less worrisome than the fact that nobody is really sure of its scope or activities. In that sense it resembles Brazil, the 1985 film directed by Terry Gilliam, almost as much as it does Oceania. The ending of the first article in the Post series therefore seems particularly apt:

Meanwhile, five miles [eight kilometers] southeast of the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. Soon, on the grounds of the former St Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a US$3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon.

In fact, the existence of a Top Secret America is just another aspect of what afflicts American culture and its political system. It is the security counterpart of what academic Janine Wedel detailed in her 2009 book Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. This described various US political operators converging into a single network who have risen to power on an unprecedented confluence of four transformational 20th and 21st century developments: government outsourcing and deregulation, the end of the Cold War, the growth of information technologies, and "the embrace of 'truthiness'."

What Priest and Arkin well know but never explicitly wrote was that after 9/11 the George W Bush administration set into motion counter-surveillance allegedly to prevent terrorists attacking America. Subsequently, US government counter-surveillance networks have become huge, supported by thousands of government employees and private contractors, many duplicating work. There are now tens of thousands of US government counter-surveillance agents, employees and private contractors monitoring US citizens' private records and communications with no US Congress or public oversight.

Put another way, the real problem is that the companies listed in the series are almost exclusively set up for the sole purpose of conducting work that belongs inside regulated and monitored government agencies.

The Post series is important insofar as it confers the official imprimatur of elite journalistic recognition that the counter-terrorism complex it details - including uncoordinated and sometimes little known entities of the military, intelligence community, homeland security, and even civil government - is growing faster than America's obesity epidemic.

But in many respects it is only codifying what has been observed and recorded by many other reporters, academics and scholars in recent years by journalists like Greg Miller (formerly of the Los Angeles Times), Tim Shorrock who wrote the book Spies For Hire and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times. (It was Shorrock who in 2007 wrote a major series in Salon disclosing that 70% of the US intelligence budget is spent on private-sector contractors). In other words, it is an example of news not being news until is published by the Washington Post.

Full story HERE