What are the odds? You put about $68
billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them
glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You
listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering
quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game
landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in
entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in
case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them
just for... well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of
the system you’ve created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world,
that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.
You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring
on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the
sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into
the “backdoors” of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user
accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding
secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and
not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the
American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your
acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and
regularly rubber stamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of
lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.
You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your
world and the millions of documents you produce doesn’t make it into our world.
You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who
might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can’t say that
their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into
congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to
tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you’re doing, you
prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign
power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if
they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and --
should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the
Earth.
As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is
theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the
intelligence-corporate complex.
What They Didn’t Know
Think of the world of the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” or IC, as a near perfect
closed system and rare success story in twenty-first-century Washington. In a
capital riven by fierce political disagreements, just about everyone agrees on
the absolute, total, and ultimate importance of that "community" and
whatever its top officials might decide in order to keep this country safe and
secure.
Yes, everything you’ve done has been in the name of national security and the
safety of Americans. And as we’ve discovered, there is never enough security,
not at least when it comes to one thing: the fiendish ability of “terrorists”
to threaten this country. Admittedly, terrorist attacks would rank above shark
attacks, but not much else on a list of post-9/11 American dangers. And for
this, you take profuse credit -- for, that is, the fact that there has never
been a “second 9/11.” In addition, you take credit for breaking up all sorts of
terror plans and plots aimed at this country, including an amazing 54 of them
reportedly foiled using the phone and email “metadata” of Americans gathered by
the NSA. As it happens, a distinguished panel appointed by President Obama,
with security clearances that allowed them to examine these spectacular claims
in detail, found that not a single one had merit.
Whatever the case, while taxpayer dollars flowed into your coffers, no one
considered it a problem that the country lacked 17 overlapping outfits bent on
preventing approximately 400,000 deaths by firearms in the same years; nor 17
interlocked agencies dedicated to safety on our roads, where more than 450,000
Americans have died since 9/11. (An American, it has been calculated, is 1,904
times more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack.) Almost
all the money and effort have instead been focused on the microscopic number of
terrorist plots -- some spurred on by FBI plants -- that have occurred on
American soil in that period. On the conviction that Americans must be shielded
from them above all else and on the fear that 9/11 bred in this country, you’ve
built an intelligence structure unlike any other on the planet when it comes to
size, reach, and labyrinthine complexity.
It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it
has a terrible record of getting anything right in a timely way. Never have so
many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so
unprepared for whatever happens in it.
When it comes to getting ahead of the latest developments on the planet, the
ones that might really mean something to the government it theoretically
serves, the IC is -- as best we can tell from the record it largely prefers to
hide -- almost always behind the 8-ball. It seems to have been caught off guard
regularly enough to defy any imaginable odds.
Think about it, and think hard. Since 9/11 (which might be considered the
intelligence equivalent of original sin when it comes to missing the mark),
what exactly are the triumphs of a system the likes of which the world has
never seen before? One and only one event is sure to come immediately to mind:
the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden. (Hey, Hollywood promptly made
a movie out of it!) Though he was by then essentially a toothless figurehead,
an icon of jihadism and little else, the raid that killed him is the single
obvious triumph of these years.
Otherwise, globally from the Egyptian spring and the Syrian disaster to the
crisis in Ukraine, American intelligence has, as far as we can tell, regularly
been one step late and one assessment short, when not simply blindsided by
events. As a result, the Obama administration often seems in a state of eternal
surprise at developments across the globe. Leaving aside the issue of
intelligence failures in the death of an American ambassador in Benghazi, for
instance, is there any indication that the IC offered President Obama a warning
on Libya before he decided to intervene and topple that country’s autocrat,
Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011? What we know is that he was told, incorrectly it
seems, that there would be a “bloodbath,” possibly amounting to a genocidal
act, if Gaddafi's troops reached the city of Benghazi.
Might an agency briefer have suggested what any reading of the results of
America's twenty-first century military actions across the Greater Middle East
would have taught an observant analyst with no access to inside information:
that the fragmentation of Libyan society, the growth of Islamic militancy (as
elsewhere in the region), and chaos would likely follow? We have to assume not,
though today the catastrophe of Libya and the destabilization of a far wider
region of Africa is obvious.
Let’s focus for a moment, however, on a case where more is known. I’m thinking
of the development that only recently riveted the Obama administration and sent
it tumbling into America’s third Iraq war, causing literal hysteria in
Washington. Since June, the most successful terror group in history has emerged
full blown in Syria and Iraq, amid a surge in jihadi recruitment across the
Greater Middle East and Africa. The Islamic State (IS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda
in Iraq, which sprang to life during the U.S. occupation of that country, has
set up a mini-state, a “caliphate,” in the heart of the Middle East. Part of
the territory it captured was, of course, in the very country the U.S.
garrisoned and occupied for eight years, in which it had assumedly developed
countless sources of information and recruited agents of all sorts. And yet, by
all accounts, when IS’s militants suddenly swept across northern Iraq, the CIA
in particular found itself high and dry.
The IC seems not to have predicted the group’s rapid growth or spread; nor,
though there was at least some prior knowledge of the decline of the Iraqi
army, did anyone imagine that such an American created, trained, and armed
force would so summarily collapse. Unforeseen was the way its officers would
desert their troops who would, in turn, shed their uniforms and flee Iraq’s
major northern cities, abandoning all their American equipment to Islamic State
militants.
Nor could the intelligence community even settle on a basic figure for how many
of those militants there were. In fact, in part because IS assiduously uses
couriers for its messaging instead of cell phones and emails, until a chance
arrest of a key militant in June, the CIA and the rest of the IC evidently knew
next to nothing about the group or its leadership, had no serious assessment of
its strength and goals, nor any expectation that it would sweep through and
take most of Sunni Iraq. And that should be passing strange. After all, it now
turns out that much of the future leadership of IS had spent time together in
the U.S. military’s Camp Bucca prison just years earlier.
All you have to do is follow the surprised comments of various top
administration officials, including the president, as ISIS made its mark and
declared its caliphate, to grasp just how ill-prepared 17 agencies and $68
billion can leave you when your world turns upside down.
Producing Subprime Intelligence as a Way of Life
In some way, the remarkable NSA revelations of Edward Snowden may have skewed
our view of American intelligence. The question, after all, isn’t simply: Who
did they listen in on or surveil or gather communications from? It’s also: What
did they find out? What did they draw from the mountains of information, the
billions of bits of intelligence data that they were collecting from individual
countries monthly (Iran, 14 billion; Pakistan, 13.5 billion; Jordan, 12.7
billion, etc.)? What was their “intelligence”? And the answer seems to be that,
thanks to the mind-boggling number of outfits doing America’s intelligence work
and the yottabytes of data they sweep up, the IC is a morass of information
overload, data flooding, and collective blindness as to how our world works.
You might say that the American intelligence services encourage the idea that
the world is only knowable in an atmosphere of big data and a penumbra of
secrecy. As it happens, an open and open-minded assessment of the planet and
its dangers would undoubtedly tell any government so much more. In that sense,
the system bolstered and elaborated since 9/11 seems as close to worthless in terms
of bang for the buck as any you could imagine. Which means, in turn, that we
outsiders should view with a jaundiced eye the latest fear-filled estimates and
overblown "predictions" from the IC that, as now with the tiny
(possibly fictional) terror group Khorasan, regularly fill our media with
nightmarish images of American destruction.
If the IC’s post-9/11 effectiveness were being assessed on a corporate model,
it’s hard not to believe that at least 15 of the agencies and outfits in its
“community” would simply be axed and the other two downsized. (If the
Republicans in Congress came across this kind of institutional tangle and
record of failure in domestic civilian agencies, they would go after it with a
meat cleaver.) I suspect that the government could learn far more about this
planet by anteing up some modest sum to hire a group of savvy observers using
only open-source information. For an absolute pittance, they would undoubtedly
get a distinctly more actionable vision of how our world functions and its
possible dangers to Americans. But of course we’ll never know. Instead,
whatever clever analysts, spooks, and operatives exist in the maze of America’s
spy and surveillance networks will surely remain buried there, while the
overall system produces vast reams of subprime intelligence.
Clearly, having a labyrinth of 17 overlapping, paramilitarized, deeply
secretive agencies doing versions of the same thing is the definition of
counterproductive madness. Not surprisingly, the one thing the U.S. intelligence
community has resembled in these years is the U.S. military, which since 9/11
has failed to win a war or accomplish more or less anything it set out to do.
On the other hand, all of the above assumes that the purpose of the IC is
primarily to produce successful “intelligence” that leaves the White House a
step ahead of the rest of the world. What if, however, it's actually a system
organized on the basis of failure? What if any work-product disaster is for the
IC another kind of win.
Perhaps it's worth thinking of those overlapping agencies as a fiendishly
clever Rube Goldberg-style machine organized around the principle that failure
is the greatest success of all. After all, in the system as it presently
exists, every failure of intelligence is just another indication that more
security, more secrecy, more surveillance, more spies, more drones are needed;
only when you fail, that is, do you get more money for further expansion.
Keep in mind that the twenty-first-century version of intelligence began amid a
catastrophic failure: much crucial information about the 9/11 hijackers and
hijackings was ignored or simply lost in the labyrinth. That failure, of
course, led to one of the great intelligence expansions, or even explosions, in
history. (And mind you, no figure in authority in the national security world
was axed, demoted, or penalized in any way for 9/11 and a number of them were
later given awards and promoted.) However they may fail, when it comes to their
budgets, their power, their reach, their secrecy, their careers, and their
staying power, they have succeeded impressively.
You could, of course, say that the world is simply a hard place to know and the
future, with its eternal surprises, is one territory that no country, no
military, no set of intelligence agencies can occupy, no matter how much they
invest in doing so. An inability to predict the lay of tomorrow's land may, in
a way, be par for the course. If so, however, remind me: Why exactly are we
supporting 17 versions of intelligence gathering to the tune of at least $68
billion a year?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of
The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of
Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His new book,
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World (Haymarket Books), has just been published.
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