July 22, 2010

 

 

Mr. Speaker, I imagine many of my colleagues have read The Washington Post report on ``Top Secret America,'' and I hope they are reacting as I am, with horror and outrage at the sprawling national security and intelligence bureaucracy that has grown like a weed in recent years. This series of articles should shock us into action, at the very least leading us to question the conventional wisdom about how best to keep America safe.

According to the Post, the counter-terrorism and homeland security apparatus has ballooned to some 1,271 government organizations working in roughly 10,000 locations around the country. There are now so many agencies analyzing so much information and issuing so many reports that the whole thing has become redundant, unmanageable, and ineffective.

Actually, we can't measure its precise effectiveness because so much of it is shrouded in secrecy. Much of the information about these agencies is classified and therefore not subject to the scrutiny it so badly needs.

If this system, which is so big that the Post refers to it as a fourth branch of government, were a domestic social program, my friends on the other side of the aisle would call it out-of-control spending.

Yet somehow, when the antigovernment rhetoric starts flying, it is never the wasteful defense and intelligence programs that come in for the harshest criticism. I'd be curious to hear, for example, why we can afford this behemoth, but we can't afford to pass a comprehensive jobs package. The organizational chart for this system looks like an octopus family on steroids, Mr. Speaker, and there are so many tentacles that it makes the proper information sharing and dot connecting nearly impossible.

I couldn't help but note the irony. If memory serves me, 9/11 exposed the inability of our intelligence agencies to coordinate and communicate properly with one another. So what have we done in response to 9/11?

We've grown our intelligence infrastructure in a way that makes it even harder to coordinate and communicate.

Of course, we would tolerate a little bit of bloat if the evidence were clear that the system were working; but according to the Post's analysis, both the Fort Hood shooting and the Christmas Day bomber could have been intercepted early on if this bureaucracy hadn't been so unwieldy, so inefficient and unresponsive. The intelligence was there, but it never got into the right hands or it was lost in an avalanche of other data.

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to protecting America, we are thinking big instead of thinking smart. There has to be a better way. We can have the intelligence capabilities we need at a fraction of the current cost, and we can use much of the savings on initiatives that attack terrorism at its roots--in places where despair and hopelessness lead people to turn to terrorism in the first place. We need to dramatically increase our investment in everything from agriculture to education to democracy-building to conflict resolution in the trouble spots of the world.

Maybe if we increased our global humanitarian outreach, if we empowered nations instead of invading and occupying them, then top secret America wouldn't even be necessary.