The Washington Post published yesterday the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic U.S. apparatus of “intelligence” activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.
As Priest and Arkin report, “The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that “the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.” To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it’s not as if they were spending their own money.
Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers’ money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It’s loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.
What we see here is not really an “intelligence” or counterterrorism operation at all. It’s a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to “fight terrorism.”
