The ‘secrecy industrial complex’
By David Rohde
An odd thing is happening in the world’s self-declared pinnacle of democracy. No one — except a handful of elected officials and an army of contractors — is allowed to know how America’s surveillance leviathan works.
For the last two years, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have tried to describe to the American public the sweeping surveillance the National Security Agency conducts inside and outside the United States. But secrecy rules block them from airing the simplest details.
Over the last few days, President Barack Obama and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have both said they welcome a national debate about the surveillance programs. But the president and senator have not used their power to declassify information that would make that debate possible.
“I flew over the World Trade Center going to Senator Lautenberg’s funeral,” Feinstein said this Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” referring to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg. “And I thought of those bodies jumping out of that building hitting the canopy. Part of our obligation is keeping America safe.”
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http://blogs.reuters.com/david-rohde/2013/06/11/the-intelligence-industrial-complex/
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And 99% of what is classified is to protect the security industrial complex, not the American people.
At minimum, the American people should be entitled to know how much we are spending on this complex. That is the absolute minimum requirement. How could divulging the overall budget possibly help a terrorist?
Obviously it wouldn't affect a terrorist one way or another. But what they fear is not terrorists. They fear an end to their gigantic slush fund.
When they make everything secret, they force us to speculate. So here is my speculation. Here are the top 5 agency budgets:
First off, how the &%@^ can we spend more on Treasury than we spend on defense? (On edit: I think this includes interest on the debt.)
Well, that could be possible if much of the defense budget is actually this dark money that never shows up on any budgets. My guess is that the dark money is at least 2.5% of GDP. That would be $400 BILLION a year or better. For all our talk of austerity, we have a right to know how much we are spending, and we have a right to demand that this be brought down to a level that actually matches our real risk.
And let me point out that we have been spending shitloads of money on these unaccountable operations for decades and that did not prevent 911. It did not stop the shoe bomber. Only blind luck did that. Even though they are monitoring Americans aggressively, all that money did not stop the marathon bombers or the Sandy Hook shooter. And while traditional intelligence (I mean real spies) played a real role in locating Osama bin Laden, none of this vast database provided one shred of evidence because we know OBL used disposable phones, changing them often.
They did catch the grumpy old men who were going to do throw firecrackers at Kennedy Airport. And maybe they caught a few other ones along the way. But we cannot have any reasonable discussion about the return on investment without knowing what the spend is. And they cannot tell us that because the numbers would be staggering.