Posted on 07/19/2010 9:03:05 AM PDT by lbryce
The Washington Post has unveiled its comprehensive, alarming, and much-anticipated report on "Top Secret America." The dedicated site details the billions of dollars in private, for-profit intelligence operations that have emerged since Sept. 11, 2001, which the Post calls our "fourth branch" of government. Led by reporters William Arkin and Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, the investigation was two years in the making and shook up the vast U.S. intelligence community even before it was released. The "Top Secret America" website includes articles, videos, interactive features, and maps all begging to be explored. But here's the executive summary.
* The Intelligence-Industrial Complex Priest and Arkin write, "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. Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. ... the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending. ... In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support. ... With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur."
* Our Fourth Branch The introductory video states, "In response to 9/11, a fourth branch has emerged. It is protected from public scrutiny by overwhelming secrecy. Americans with top secret clearance."
Link to Washington Post Report
Washington Post Investigation:TOP SECRET AMERICA
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlanticwire.com ...
Hope the link works now.
I wonder if anyone trulyhas any idea what’s going on in “Top Secret America”. So much information, so little “truth”.
and so little that really need to be classified as “top secret”
you know... these newspapers need to be reminded there is a war going on here. Top Secret is supposed to be just that.
Hillary Flammond: I know. It all sounds like some bad movie.
Is it possible to have too much security? I do not know if this is that big a problem.
I just read it, and it is, well, boring. The basic revelation: we have a pantload of intelligence agencies and contractors, and we're not sure they are effective at either inter- or intra- agency communications. Shocker.
Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
“...There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed..” Luke 12:2
Lots of surprises coming.
That depends on what the security is for. Is it security for us or for the government. I no longer trust the government in this country. I don’t fear them because I know who and what they are. I will just divorce them. They can have it.
Now who would want to willfully damage American intelligence gathering ?
Simple answer, the authors, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin .
Dana Priest and William Arkin have long history of leaking vital national security secrets, as well as publishing agit-prop to advance their own causes.
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting “for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret ‘black site’ prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” Never mind that to this day there is no evidence that these ‘secret CIA prisons’ ever existed.
But perhaps Dana Priest has her own agenda. She is a ‘peace scholar’ for the United States Institute of Peace. She is also married to William Goodfellow, who is the Executive Director of the the Center for International Policy (CIP).
Here is a little background from Discover The Networks about the Center For International Policy:
http://97.74.65.51/Printable.aspx?ArtId=11573
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6991
America’s Red Army
One of the most sophisticated of Fenton’s anti-war projects is the co-mingling of Win Without War and the Center for International Policy (CIP).
Before 9/11, CIP, a Fenton Communications client, mainly acted as Fidel Castro’s greatest “think tank” ally. Much of its million-dollar budget was spent lobbying to end economic sanctions and travel restrictions against Cuba.
Now, it has another mission. Fenton has established a “war room” with CIP called The Iraq Policy Information Program (IPIP). Its main job is getting the anti-Bush foreign policy message out to the media and providing guests for talk shows. A featured speaker of the IPIP is former ambassador Joe Wilson, one of the Bush administration’s most vocal enemies.
Like Moveon.org and Win Without War, the contact for the Iraq Policy Information Program is Fenton Communications. Win Without War also collects tax-deductible donations through CIP.
Here Dana Priest and Mel Goodman shared a stage behind the CIP banner in October 2003:
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/8458371_VotEv#939741809_j3Ni5-A-LB
Mel Goodman is a member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which is an organization that pleads with former and current CIA officers to break their oaths and leak secrets that would hurt our national security.
William Arkin has a similar background.
Arkin is a former Greenpeace “researcher.” He has also worked for the radical left Institute for Policy Studies and Human Rights Watch, and even the notorious leftwing fantasist, Seymour Hersh.
In fact, Mr. Arkin considers himself more of an activist than a journalist. (Not that there is any discernible difference in our one party media.)
From the Washington Post, via Lexis-Nexus:
Explosive Analyst
William Arkin, Giving Opinions Left and Right
By Howard Kurtz
Friday, May 24, 2002; Page C01
… He insists he’s not a journalist.
In fact, he’s an activist who works for the liberal group Human Rights Watch.
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/2-reporters-behind-the-wps-latest-leak
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Well said.
When almost 900,000 people have Top Secret clearances you really have to wonder. What are the odds that you could get the entire population of Philadelphia to keep their mouths shut about anything?
This story to me just illustrates that government is pretty much structurally incapable of managing ANYTHING efficiently, be that intelligence, health care, school lunches, etc.
soetoro pleased
Generally the character of the average person with TS clearance is more reliable and generally patriotic than the average person in Phliadelphia. That’s how most secrets are able to be kept.
Boy, I had to chuckle at that one!
CA....
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