The Associated Press and the Washington Post have not necessarily distinguished themselves in covering politics and power during the past decade or two, but both institutions have embarked upon important and large scale projects looking at issues that are central to the way the national security state operates these days (which is pretty much the way it has operated in preceding days, but we need periodic reminders, which inevitably come as a surprise to many people).
The Post has just published the first of an investigative series by longtime intelligence beat reporter, Dana Priest, looking at the malignant tumor that passes for our national intelligence operation. The Post is collaborating on the project with the PBS investigative program, Frontline.
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.
…
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.
It’s very fine and somewhat mind-boggling work from one of the more consistently reliable national beat reporters, and the subjects of the story were anxious about it before it hit print. Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic got hold of a memo circulated by the communications director at the Department of National Intelligence, the agency which is supposed to coordinate the entire Rube Goldberg/Bruce Banner affair.
While we can’t predict specific content, we anticipate the following themes:
· The intelligence enterprise has undergone exponential growth and has become unmanageable with overlapping authorities and a heavily outsourced contractor workforce.
· The IC and the DoD have wasted significant time and resources, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and counterintelligence.
· The intelligence enterprise has taken its eyes off its post-9/11 mission and is spending its energy on competitive and redundant programs.
This series has been a long time in preparation and looks designed to cast the IC and the DoD in an unfavorable light. We need to anticipate and prepare so that the good work of our respective organizations is effectively reflected in communications with employees, secondary coverage in the media and in response to questions.
The series is actually designed to allow various components of the machine to present themselves in an unfavorable light. It’ll be interesting to see how the Post editorial pages react to the series, given as they are to a lickspittle approach to power.
AP, meanwhile, kicked off a series they call “Fixing Afghanistan” with a look at electricity generation in the country.
The goal is to transform Afghanistan into a modern nation, fueled by a U.S.-led effort pouring $60 billion into bringing electricity, clean water, jobs, roads and education to this crippled country. But the results so far – or lack of them – threaten to do more harm than good.
Case in point: a $100 million diesel-fueled power plant that was supposed to be built swiftly to deliver electricity to more than 500,000 residents of Kabul, the country’s largest city. The plant’s costs tripled to $305 million as construction lagged a year behind schedule, and now it often sits idle because the Afghans were able to import cheaper power from a neighboring country before the plant came online.
And so on. It’s a really well reported story, although it does slip into a colonialist frame of reference from time to time.
The amount of time and expense to put together these types of stories is enormous, by newspaper standards, and most papers are increasingly reluctant make that sort of investment, not just because of the expense but also because it partially sidelines their showcase reporters. So both the Post and AP deserve some applause for underwriting stories that will be far from uniformly popular among the sources they rely upon for their daily bread.
The stories again:
Top Secret America
Fixing Afghanistan
Give ‘em a go. You won’t be cheered but you’ll be better empowered to recognize official bullshit when it comes sliding down the hill toward you.
They’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of this on teh news circuits, and I agree with you, it’s good work, and the degree to which we outsource intelligence and the military is unsettling. Interesting comments in the article on the architecture–I’ve been around DC just enough to be slightly familiar with the sort of setting. Faceless impenetrable monoliths are made relatively human by the noontime divestment of hordes of suits buying lunch and interacting with the public, but there they are just the same. Orwell had ‘em as intimidating, but in practice blend right in with the corporate scenery. The old-style industrial, military, and national labs campuses are a lot weirder, like colleges where no one’s having so much fun.
One quibble is that I think they’re reading too much into the number of clearances as an indicator. A lot of technical capability gets buried under classification too.
The other thing that annoyed me is that “unwieldy” is a required word in every damn report. I always thought it was “unwieldly” but that’s evidently the British version, and while I don’t normally go in for the queen’s English, hearing Dana Priest correctly mangle it on NPR has been driving me nuts.
Man, you have some mad Anglophile skillz. I like to think I’m up on this stuff but I had no idea that was a word. From the OED:
More likely that I’ve been hearing/writing it incorrectly for 20 years. As yesterday’s word of the day, the revelation kinda smarts.