WaPo: What's Really Behind the Story

The Washington Post has published massive amounts of secret intelligence material in the interests, they say, of improving US national security. The two authors, Dana Priest and William Arkin, complain about a national security enterprise that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11. The reveal in detail the firms working for the US intelligence community including their location, contracts, and work subjects, whether border security, cyber-security or counter proliferation.

There are two common explanations for the story. First, it is juicy story. It has lots of secret information. And for two reporters, pursuing a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, well isn’t this what reporters do? The second explanation: their view is that the national security establishment represented by the $75 billion intelligence community and its network of firms, organizations and contractors is not serving the American people, that it is bloated, redundant and need of serious downsizing. But all, mind you, to make our security better.

There may be a third explanation. It may be they think little if any of this intelligence work is necessary. Nearly a decade ago, on October 12, 2002, William Arkin, the co-author of the article, spoke at the Naval War College. One key part of his talk is nearly identical to the thesis of the Post article. He said: “More than 30 billion of our tax dollars each year go towards government generated intelligence information. We had, and have, a CIA and an intelligence community that has a fantastic history of failure, that is mostly blind to what is going on in the world, that seems to know nothing and at the same time is so bombarded and overwhelmed with stimuli from its millions of receptors it can hardly sense what is happening.”

Arkin goes on in his 2002 speech to blame America for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He says our military prowess forced our adversaries to use attacks against our vulnerable infrastructure, such as airplanes or trains because they could not successfully fight our military. And he says our support for Gulf autocracies and stationing troops there gave cause for the attacks of 9/11. The implied solution is very simple: stop supporting harsh regimes, withdraw our forces from the Gulf and terrorism disappears.

This underlying view of what we are supposedly facing permeates the Post story as well. They describe what they think this vast intelligence enterprise is trying to do: “defeating transnational violent extremists,” “fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda,” and find “clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.”

But only once do they give a hint as to why we have this vast enterprise when they complain that when hired “a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But these countries are not Al Qaeda. They are not terrorist groups. They are or were terrorism sponsors. And that is where the authors are terribly confused.

We are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq precisely because these two nations spawned the terrorist attacks of 9/11: the Taliban who harbored the training camps of Al Qaeda; and Iraq whose sponsorship of terrorism included directing the terrorist/intelligence operatives Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef and their 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The former, as we now know, was also the mastermind of 9/11.

Terror organizations, whether Hezbollah, Hamas, Abu Sayev, Al Qaeda, FARC, the FMLN, do not exist apart from states. And it is these states that are at war with us, especially through their terrorist group proxies. And Pakistan’s ISI or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein were not at war with us because we supported harsh regimes in the Middle East. In fact, they were the harsh regimes!

From this perspective, why would two reporters reveal to our enemies a road-map of our security infrastructure? It would be akin to doing so in the midst of World War II by sending Japan and Nazi Germany details of our war effort. How much easier to see the terrorism as rooted in the failure of US foreign policy, as opposed to the hegemonic and imperial designs of states seeking our destruction.