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The more we know the less we know

Thursday, July 22, 2010

NO INFORMED OBSERVER expects anything but full Senate confirmation for President Barack Obama’s nominee, James Clapper (left) as our nation’s next hood-ornament.

Say what?  Well, that’s the insulting description applied this week to the position of National Intelligence Director, during General Clapper’s audition for it before the Senate’s Intelligence Committee.

 

The General hotly denied, of course, that he was headed toward such a purposeless role in government, but you can certainly see why we’d all think that a hood-ornament is pretty much what he’ll end up being.

Compelling background to the panel’s proceedings came from the federal district’s hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, doing one of those tremendous services it occasionally renders to the nation. It’s taken the paper two years of dogged investigation by reporters Dana Priest and Bill Arkin, along with a clutch of dedicated editors, researchers and other contributors, and the results are both fascinating and disturbing.

Quite apart from convincingly demonstrating the sheer size that our national security apparatus has achieved so quickly (the Post’s multi-part series, with its own website topsecretamerica@washpost.com, takes as its starting-point the jolt to the system delivered by the 9/11 attacks, and the feverish expansion since then) this probe gives us a dizzying sense of how out-of-control such spatchcocked machinery can inevitably turn out to be. In full recognition that its team may have even undercounted, the Post has identified some 1,270 government bodies and 1,930 private contractor companies at work in the counter-terrorism field.

Priest and Arkin themselves, after all the commentators have squawked their reactions ranging from shock to cynicism, remain the most eloquent summarizers of their own findings on today's so-called "intelligence community”.

 

“No one knows", they say, "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."

 

Such uncoordinated growth in spookery has inescapably led to so much data being collected now that analysts and interpreters cannot keep up with the essential task of making sense of what's known.
 

 

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A SYMPTOM OF THIS MESSY proliferation is one that the Post doesn’t dwell on – just one, but it's mind-boggling in itself. I'm intrigued by that especially sprawling area of anti-terrorism effort, the Department of Homeland Security, which was the first institutional knee-jerk reaction that came in 9/11's aftermath - and it's the dimension of public accountability that intrigues me most.

 

The DHS has ended up having its work overseen - or rather supposedly overseen - by no fewer than 108 different committees of Congress. One of my home state’s Congressmen, the Republican Peter King of Long Island, says that all these multiple overseers are “a tremendous source of delay, time and confusion". I’d put it more simply myself: whenever there are 108 overseers, there in fact are none.

It’s similar in the case of General Clapper. As Under-Secretary at the Department of Defense he comes from running one single intelligence agency, but once confirmed he will be (once again supposedly) supervising the work of sixteen different spy outfits. It’s this very multiplicity of organizations, with their frequently self-defeating turf wars and crossed wires, that the Post investigation makes such a powerful job of highlighting.

 

As this column has repeatedly said about tracking terrorists internationally, professionals whose job it is to connect the dots are doing themselves no service (nor us, the civilian population at risk) by hiding the dots they see from each other - whether they do it deliberately or just in a confusing fog of over-abundant information.

And quite simply - it almost goes without saying for the General - when you supervise sixteen outfits, you supervise none.


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