When Intelligence is Stupid

Worth breaking the WaPo embargo for is part one of a new series investigating our intelligence agencies, or more specifically the explosion of agencies and money sunk into our intelligence appartus since the 9/11 attacks. The stats are sobering:

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.

More expansion is still being authorized under the Obama adminstration but it clearly isn't making our counter-terrorism efforts any more effective. In fact the evidence suggests it's having an adverse effect with the information overload, interagency turf wars and failure to share intelligence making the whole operation fairly useless.

None of this is particularly surprising. The only real question I have at the moment is why did the WaPo wait until a Democratic president was elected to start investigating? Seems to me this investigation, while it's good, would have been a whole lot more useful a few years ago before it grew to this proportion.