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.

The Panetta pick

Obama chose his new CIA chief, Leon Panetta. It seems like a pretty good choice to me. I don't much about the guy but from what I'm reading, he's a savvy insider without the baggage of being beholden to the Village elders. He's also been solidly and consistently anti-torture. Word has it he's likely to change the focus of the agency from enabling the warmongers to giving real world intelligence analysis to the president.

The biggest point in favor of his appointment is that it has the new chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Diane Feinstein, throwing a hissy fit.

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA Director. I know nothing about this, other than what I’ve read,” Feinstein said in a statement. “My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

Well, Sen. Feinstein, if you want to be the one that chooses the cabinet, run for President yourself dammit. Outgoing chair Jay Rockfeller is also deeply concerned about this pick. Considering the pair are two of the greatest enablers of the gross civil rights violations of the Bush regime, if they hate the pick, it must be a good one.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News.]

Go forth and read

By Libby

It's almost halfway through the month and I already have a lot of links saved that I'm never going to get around to blogging but are worth reading and should at least at be archived. It's Sunday night. What better time to catch up on your reading?

With all the focus on the primaries, Iraq hasn't been leading the news cycle but it's good to remember that it's still a mess over there. No matter what the White House tells you, the surge really didn't work. In fact, 2007 was the deadliest year for US troops since the invasion and as Dahr Jamail points out with a long list of 'benchmarks,' it wasn't so great for the Iraqis either.

Sibel Edmunds revelations on 9/11 is the most underreported, yet most explosive story in years. Our high ranking government officials gave nuclear technology to our enemies. You won't see it in the MSM. Only Chris Floyd has done it justice.

In better news, thread by thread, the veil of secrecy around the Bush administration is being shredded.

Of course, they won't have as many secrets to keep anyway. In a delicious irony, the telecoms have shut down wiretaps because the FBI failed to pay their bills.

If you're already worried about money, you probably don't want to read about the slow mo collapse of our house of cards economy. But better to be armed with knowledge, than be unpleasantly ambushed when it falls altogether.

On a lighter note, here's a defense of open wifi networks at home from a surprising source.

And here's some good news.I don't know about you, but one of my greatest fears is developing Alzheimers in my golden years. I'm thrilled to discover they may have found a cure.

Meanwhile, we've never been number one in health care outcomes, but in the last four years we've sank to rock bottom. The politicans are lying when they tell you we already have the best health care in the world. We don't and it costs too much for lousy coverage.

And finally, this one is old but I loved this quote by Eugene Robinson.

The word “change” has had great resonance in the Iowa campaign. In part, the yearning for change arises because George W. Bush has led the nation down so many dead-end paths. But from the conversations I had with Iowans, it seemed clear to me that change is also shorthand for the disconnect between the Washington state of mind and the widespread expectation, hardly unreasonable, that this city ought to actually get something done every once in a while.

Really and we don't care how it gets done as long as it answers to the will of the people instead of the whims of the corporations.

[h/t to Avedon and Radley]

Needle in the haystack surveillance invites trouble

By Libby

More disturbing news today on how wide net surveillance fails to catch any big fish.

The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness.

A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials would not be more specific.

Why do I think that means Blackwater?

The government hacks justify the approach by pointing out that they stop a lot of people but don't arrest them. That's a defense of the program? Either they're stopping a lot of innocent people unnecessarily -- which they do, a fact that's well documented -- or they are alerting real terrorists that they're under suspicion but aren't guilty enough to be arrested yet. Do you think that's going to scare them away, or make them more careful?

And people call me paranoid when I say this administration is practically begging for a new 9/11?

Privatizing America

By Libby

Brought to you by the party that wants to shrink government until it can be drowned in a bathtub, here's the latest example of the Bush administration's largest entitlement program - back door corporate welfare.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.

Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department, according to a congressional tally in June. Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks caught many of them unprepared to meet new demands with their existing workforce.

The small government/free market types keep telling me that privatization is more efficient and saves us money. Bah. We pay up to ten times more to corporate cronies for the same work we used to have government employees do and they deliver a shoddy product because there's no mandated oversight or performance metrics in the contracts.

This is same logic that put around 100,000 private contractors into Iraq -- whose over-inflated salaries are somehow not counted in the war costs and whose dead are not tallied. The same scheme that has cost us over a billion in tax dollars and hasn't even approached restoring the Gulf Coast, two years after the devastation of Katrina. The same lame-brained notion that led to the scandal at Walter Reed.

And now they're going to put our privacy in the hands of private contractors? It's not surprising they're overwhelmed with work. All that domestic surveillance and wide-sweep eavesdropping has generated more data than anyone can sift through. I'm not happy with the government doing it but at least we have some small method of demanding accountability from them. Private contractors won't be bound by the same rules of disclosure. I don't consider that an improvement, much less an acceptable alternative.

Planned incompetence

By Libby

I think we've been giving the Commander Guy a bad rap. He's not as clueless or incompetent as we thought he was. He did have a plan. He clearly wanted a war that would haunt America for generations and his plan is working perfectly -- well except for the part where he's being exposed as a pathological liar. I'd guess he never counted on having to account for why he ignored these reports.

WASHINGTON — Two months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies twice warned the Bush administration that establishing a democracy there would prove difficult and that Al Qaeda would use political instability to increase its operations, according to a Senate report released Friday.

The report, issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee, brought to light once-classified warnings that accurately forecasted many of the military and political problems the Bush administration and Iraqi officials have faced since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

These warnings were distributed to senior officials with daily access to President Bush and others at the very top of the administration, the report states.

If you read the list of bullet points at the link, every one of those warnings came true. So why would the Great Decider deliberately ignore and fail to disclose these salient points to the Congress and the people in his selling of the war? One can only conclude it's because that is the exactly the result he intended from the beginning. Not that he isn't trying to cover up by playing the incompetency card.

President Bush said at a news conference Thursday that his administration was "warned about a lot of things, some of which happened, some of which didn't happen."

But, he added, "The world's better off without Saddam Hussein in power. I know the Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein in power. I think America is safer without Saddam Hussein in power. As to al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Qaida's going to fight us wherever we are."

The only predictions that didn't come true were his and Cheney and Rumsfeld's rosy predictions of a fast clean war with a quick getaway. Of course, the public wouldn't have bought into the invasion in the first place if he had shared the damaging intelligence and his real plan, instead of the discredited reports he chose to selectively leak.

This report is long in coming and almost five years too late.
Steve Benen posting at TPM has a timeline on the delay and ultimate refusal to complete this report under the GOP rubberstamp Congress who preferred to keep Americans in the dark about the President's wilful incompetence in order to protect their electoral interests in 04.

Steve also raises an interesting question.

In January 2007, after the Senate changed hands, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) agreed that it was finally time to take this investigation seriously.

As for why Rockefeller and committee Dems decided to release the report on a Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend ... well, I can't figure that one out.

I'm afraid the answer to that is the Democrats have no real interest in ending the occupation either. They appear to prefer to make political hay with its continued failures while pretending to be against it, than actually act in the best interests of the country and bring this debacle to a long overdue close.

It's official - the terrorists have won

I've been warning about this since the day after 9/11 and finally the evidence is being revealed. In the shock and panic after 9/11 we allowed our government to create a police state with nary a murmur of protest. How is this even legal?

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

...From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

No one would argue that the NYC PD doesn't have a legitimate interest in preventing acts of violence but the difference between a group of Quakers and an anarchists bent on vandalism couldn't be more clear. Even more clear is that the NYPD overstepped their boundaries by thousands of miles, apparently under court sanction.

...In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

...These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

There is a glaring difference between groups organizing to exercise their constitutionally protected right to peacefully protest and the very few radical organizations that intend to cause mayhem, and among those there are even fewer that would seek to hurt innocent citizens. Their brand of violence mostly lends itself towards disruption and vandalism. The difference is easily discerned by historical reference and a cursory look at websites.

The wide net approach taken by the NYPD betrays the bedrock principles of our democracy and smacks more of the intimidation tactics of the Gestapo than a law enforcement unit with a mission to protect and serve. Even more concerning is just how wide a net the NYPD cast.

New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

Again, the NYPD has every right to protect its biggest city, but we are talking about a local law enforcement unit that is operating far outside the limits of its jurisdiction. The NYPD may have rightly felt failed by federal intelligence agencies, but that is not a justification for them to effectively take over a federal function that itself has already run amok in shattering the limits of reasonable domestic surveillance. Even worse, they conducted this operation to "protect" the the ruling political party's convention from having to encounter uncomfortable rhetoric from peaceful protestors. I've seen no indication that the delegates themselves were in imminent danger of physical harm.

If this isn't the definition of a police state, then please tell me how to define it.

[thanks to Cernig, Gun Toting Liberal and Sonia Smith at Slate for the links]

Gates repairs interagency intelligence relations

I have to admit I had serious doubts about new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, but he's acquitted himself well so far. He's taken the lead in rooting out those responsible for the dismal treatment of our war wounded and they say he has a more inclusive approach to consulting with the key players within the Defense department. But even more encouraging is Gates' move to dismantle Rummy's personal secret intelligence network.

Rumsfeld appeared to be channelling Herbert Hoover in creating a network of spies answerable only to himself and with unclear objectives other than to keep track of his political enemies. This created an atmosphere of distrust within the different branches of intelligence and only hurt operations critical to battling terrorism. Gates appears to be smoothing some ruffled feathers and creating a more harmonious framework between the agencies. Whatever else he does or doesn't do in the future, this seems to me to be a good thing.