That title doesn't refer to dendrology, but the subject is definitely about pruning.
Reading Ed Cline's latest, the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the most serious omission in the Constitution was some kind of explicit and immediate consequences for politicians who enact and enforce legislation that violates the Constitution -- make any signatory to a legislative act suffer consequences more immediate than the remote threat of impeachment. That is, any politician who signs a bill ruled unconstitutional by the Supremes should be immediately removed from office, permanently barred from any future office, and held personally liable for damages therefrom. And members of the executive branch who enforce it should suffer the same fate.
What we have today is politicians who are utterly without fear of violating the Constitution. I'm thinking of Obama in his strong-arm tactics with business, or through his minions such as Secretary of Interior Salazar, who is flat out ignoring two court rulings stating he has no authority to stop all drilling in the Gulf. Ad infinitum. Egregious violations of the Constitution go back much further than Obama, of course.
Why do they have no fear? Because there's so little chance they will be impeached. Certainly, Obama isn't worried about this. There's just too much latitude for any politician to knowingly propose any brand of stupidity or evil they want without concern for the lives it will destroy or injure, nor the consequences to himself for proposing it. Authority is too far disconnected from responsibility.
The system I propose merely puts one aspect of removal of bad politicians on autopilot and takes it out of the hands of Congress, so that no party can do what the Dems are doing today. For any system to work with checks and balances there simply has to be palpable consequences to the unbalanced who are being checked. I emphasize the word "palpable".
Impeachment should still be a recourse for criminal and unethical behavior, but there should be a new category: behavior without regard for the Constitution. That would be a category for the third branch of government to participate in preventing -- not directly, but indirectly, by an automatic process that goes into motion the moment a legislative act is ruled unconstitutional.
(I might argue that there should be a fourth branch of government charged with only one job: ensuring that officials are indeed removed from office, to eliminate the possibility that the other three branches never engage in wink and nod behavior.)
Even for the appellate courts, a similar standard should be applied: if they render any decision that is too egregiously in conflict with the Constitution, a judge should be removed as well, though probably not automatically. What is "egregious"? I think this can only be decided by humans according to some standard. But what can be automatic is the requirement for some kind of judicial review of all lower court judges who affirmed an unconstitutional decision, according to an objective standard -- for instance, was there any precedent at all for the erroneous decision? I do think that judges require a different standard because errors will be made by lower courts. That's why we have an appellate system. But I don't judges should be free of consequences either. I'll leave further details for another time.
Some would argue this kind of automatic removal of politicians places too much power in the judicial branch, with the opportunity for corruption of judges as a means of entrenching one-party rule, since a court decision will tend to affect one party more than the other -- a single decision could even remove an entire party, such as the one that signed the recent Health Care bill. Well that might be a good thing, but a bad Supreme decision could remove the other party. Well, that might be a good thing too. But you get my drift. This could happen even if the court makes honest, albeit bad decisions.
Of course, a Supreme Court judge guilty of corruption or incompetence could be impeached for bad decisions, but that's unlikely by the legislators surviving a decision.
The potential for one-party rule is a very dangerous result. A fair criticism. Perhaps the removal from office of all signatories to a bill places too much power in the court. So let's say only the legislative sponsors of a bill should be immediately removed from office -- along with any President who signs it. And let's include a requirement that every bill must have an explicit sponsor or sponsors who are responsible for the content of it. (This would surely eliminate "bipartisan" sponsors. Hasta la Vista McCain-Feingold.)
One way to handle the objections here is simply to a create a mechanism for the legislature to seek a priori Constitutional review of a oroposed bill by the Supreme Court. If the court rules okay -- all are absolved. (This would also slow the introduction of new bills according to the schedule of the 9 Supremes, which I think is a good thing.)
Some would argue that Court decisions are often rendered years after a politician leaves office, or that legislative acts could be written to only go into effect years later, to insulate politicians from the consequences -- as was done with the Health Care bill. But this is one reason I say legislators (and executive officers responsible for enforcement) should also be subject to monetary and criminal damages. In perpetuity. For the entire contents of a bill. And members of the executive branch who enforce any unconstitutional law should remain liable, even years after it is enacted.
As I've said before, this would encourage legislators to actually read the bills they sign, and think about them. It would immediately discourage the recent phenomenon of "omnibus" bills that have everything in them but the kitchen sink. For instance, the Health Care bill. Or the new Financial "overhaul" bill. Or even a large defense appropriation.
For instance, imagine a legislator like Charlie Rangel who sponsors a bill for a new draft. Let's say this goes into effect and Charlie leaves Congress, under his own power or in leg-irons. Meanwhile, millions of people get drafted, many having their lives ruined for some period of time, suffeing lost income, death, etc.
To my unsophisticated thinking, Charlie should bear some of the consequences for that. He should pay every penny he has to compensate those whose lives he impoverished, even if it leaves him a panhandler pushing a shopping cart down the street. But he should also be cited for causing a wrongful death if he caused any wrongful death -- prison time. Say hello to Big Bubba, your new roommate.
The whole idea is to bring responsibility in line with authority. Whenever the two become disconnected, you have bad consequences. The highest authority should bear the highest responsibility.
The prospect of immediate removal would deter politicians from sponsoring bad legislation. The prospect of monetary and criminal damages in perpetuity (and without recourse to bankruptcy) would deter them from supporting any bill they deem as potentially remotely unconstitutional. The combination would deter a lot of bad people from seeking office. Whatever the shortcomings of this incomplete proposal, I think all that is a good thing.
I understand this. I was there for the 50th anniversary when the "walk" almost brought the bridge down. We came up from Chrissy Field early in the morning, and even by 8AM the crowds had vastly exceeded the expectations -- instead of 50,000 people, it was something like a million, as I recall (including all those who couldn't even get on the bridge). We came up the hillside to the bridge and the road was jammed with people, from the south as far as I could see, and to the north, across the bridge toward Sausalito.
We tried going across the bridge -- futile. In one hour we went 100 yards. The pressure of the crowd kept intensifying till you almost couldn't breathe. Kids were crying. People were starting to panic. We got scared and turned around, and took another hour to make our way off the bridge.
As we started back down the hillside, I looked along the bridge and could clearly see a major dimple downward in the middle, between the two sections of roadway at that point. Imagine two arcs extending from either end of the bridge towards the middle, where it was depressed almost 12 feet downward from normal (again, from memory), in a sharp cusp from the weight of so many people. The bridge cables were stretched that much. (It most certainly was not "level" as the story below says, except in an average sense.)
I told the people in my party that it looked like the bridge was in danger of breaking, and the news that evening confirmed that: the bridge hadn't been designed for such a high density of weight (not to mention the dynamic load!), and the 3X static over-design factor built into the bridge (again, from memory) had almost totally been used up.
Seriously, San Francisco dodged a major bullet that day. Imagine if there had been a stampede, which was brewing with the growing panic (believe me, it was palpable). 300,000 people were on that bridge. The dynamic shaking could have brought down many spans, and those not hurled into the water with all the concrete and steel would still have been trampled. I could easily imagine 100,000 could have died.
The fireworks display that evening was spectacular, by the way, when we went back down to Chrissy Field. Aside from the multiple barges pumping exploding rockets into the air everywhere, the bridge was made to look like a vast waterfall of fire was coming off of it. A memorable day.
Golden Gate Bridge officials nix walk for 75th anniversary
Mark Prado
Marin Independent Journal
Posted: 07/23/2010 05:39:11 PM PDT
Updated: 07/23/2010 05:42:00 PM PDT
Those hoping to walk the Golden Gate Bridge when the span celebrates its 75th birthday in 2012 won't get that chance.
Bridge officials have nixed the walk out of concerns for security and crowd control and will instead focus on an undetermined event in the area, possibly at Crissy Field in San Francisco with the assistance of the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy.
When the bridge turned 50 in 1987, an estimated 300,000 people poured onto the bridge when the famed roadway was shut down. The weight of humanity caused the span to lose its arch and become level. "We looked at a walk along the lines of what occurred in 1987, but in light of the events of 9/11 and in light of all the construction projects going on, it was decided by the 75th anniversary advisory committee that we would not have a bridge walk," said Mary Currie, bridge district spokeswoman.
Dietrich Stroeh, a board member from Marin who sits on the committee, said the threat of terrorism at an event that is hard to control was a factor in the decision.
"We didn't have that issue in our heads in 1987," he said. "Security is a more of a factor now. The more people you have there, the more potential you have for problems. Just the access to the bridge itself is an issue. We are very cautious now of where people can go on the bridge."
The committee - made up of board members - looked at a limited bridge walk involving a set number of tickets, but the idea was eventually rejected.
"It would take a large force to manage something like that," Currie said. "To have a large gathering on a small space didn't seem prudent. The number of people who came in 1987 was overwhelming, and we were lucky then there were no incidents."
And with continuing seismic work on the bridge, as well as work on Doyle Drive to the south and on roads in the Marin Headlands to the north, bridge officials said they will have to figure out a new way to celebrate the span on its 75th birthday.
In addition to a span walk on the bridge's 50th birthday, there was one on May 27, 1937, the day before it opened to vehicular traffic. The 25th anniversary was celebrated with a civic luncheon.
On Friday, the bridge board approved a plan to enter negotiations with the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy to develop money making ventures to help fund a celebration and to raise money beyond the anniversary. The conservancy has helped restore Crissy Field, rehabilitated buildings in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has worked on trails, among other projects.
"A partnership seems natural and logical," said Greg Moore, who heads the conservancy.
The conservancy would develop commemorative products as well as related events if it ends up working with the bridge district.
"The ideas and possibilities are endless," said Janet Reilly, bridge board member who is heading the 75th anniversary committee
The long Washington Post article copied below is a little simple-minded and naive, and I can point to at least one error (mis-identification of two buildings near Dulles), but well worth reading to give you an inkling (and only an inkling) of the scope of intelligence operations in this country, which includes "854,000 people with Top Secret clearances". Maybe it's that many.
The article serves partly as a demonstration of the folly of trying to solve the terrorism problem with straightjackets of intelligence and security instead of eliminating the regimes that sponsor it, using direct military action... massive bureaucracy and overload of useless information that stultifies the ability to integrate it usefully. They cite (and I believe) analysis that endlessly regurgitates old information while new primary source information gets buried in the morass... sounds like much of academia.
An interesting question to me is: what's the proper scope of intelligence operations in a rational society, especially in a modern world. I suppose one could argue that a hundred years of rational foreign policy in some fairy-tale world would eliminate (one way or another) all the slave states armed with nuclear weapons and terrorists, and the threats would be so much less that you need but a fraction of the intelligence we have today. And more rational people would probably be much more effective at the intelligence they conduct, so you wouldn't need so many analysts to churn out 50,000 redundant reports per year.
But those two buildings I mentioned are the headquarters for (when I last checked, though I'm told they are in disarray now with Democratic budget cuts) a $40 to 50 billion dollar space program (annually, since 1960, though the official number was long classified). And the NSA has to maintain an unbelievable number of computers and other systems to track virtually every electronic transmission on the planet. That's pretty expensive when you include the support staff.
More trivially, this excerpt
Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders. One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.
reminds me of an anecdote of a late friend (last November) who told me how once he had a new commander that asked him for his clearances. My friend started reciting them and about halfway through, his commander said "Stop! I'm not cleared to hear these!" You got that? Paranoia runs deep in this world.
Or the hallway discussions between 3 or 4 people that always start out with a 5 minute preamble where everybody compares badges ("Tickets") and decides who can hear what from whom.
"Top Secret" is actually not that high a clearance. More like the entry level to a skyscraper, a few steps up from the sidewalk of "Secret". The grand irony is that any dufus or even a Russian spy who can get elected to be President automatically has the highest clearance and access to anything without any background check whatsover and he can give the same clearance to any cronies he hires. The Strobe Talbot and Van Jones types. Or he or his cronies can de-classify and make public any information they want (as Clinton's people did, like Hazel O'Leary, in giving away a vast number of our nuclear secrets).
Of course, buried in the layers of bureaucracies there actually are people who give a damn about this country, and to some degree they can keep things out of sight of the SOBs.
On the issue of spending large sums of money for intelligence, my same friend once had a guy known only as "John" appear to see a special site he was working at. "John" asked what he needed and my friend said casually, "a new C130". A month later, he was surprised to find that he got it. That's something like a $100M airplane, in his case, when fully outfitted. ("John" later got booted from the Pentagon for taking classified material home -- I inferred later he was undersecretary for defense.)
Or those two buildings I alluded to: they were built for $400M out of a slush fund (1992-94-ish timeframe, when a dollar still wasn't worth much, but it was worth a lot more than today).
My friend's anecdotes were the military intel side. A bit different elsewhere. CIA has vast resources. If you've ever been to Las Vegas and seen all the 737's at McCarron airport that have orange tails -- most are CIA, except for a bunch that fly back and forth to Area 51 and a few other places that are lots more secret. Though the main hub for their fleet sits in Arizona, between Phoenix and Tucson.
I might also briefly mention that the intelligence agencies also have a great many hooks into American business. They are on boards of big companies, and sometimes they run the big companies. They are often venture capitalists, and even found startups themselves. They also run autonomous satellite operations of established businesses, affectionately known in the trade as "conehead operations" -- an allusion to the pointy-headed aliens on the old Saturday Night Live show, back when Dan Ackroyd and company were still on TV.
They sometimes have had too much affection for clever names. I even interviewed once at a startup called "Alien Technologies" that had a life-sized talking model of Robby the (pointy-headed) Robot in the front lobby -- from the movie "Forbidden Planet". The first guy I talked to sat down and set a CIA coffee mug in front of me. (The product was... RF ID chips. Go figure. Or at least, go figure what you can do with RF ID chips on every pallet of goods in the world, or in every credit card in the world.)
I've wondered about other companies. I mean, I know every cellphone has a broken security key (not every 128 bit RSA security key is really 128 bits), but if you wanted a backdoor into every computer in the world, at the beginning of the computer revolution (1968), what could be more convenient than to make the computer chips themselves? What to call this new company... something clever... yet, with a hint of intrigue...
Pure speculation.
The article, by the way, doesn't even begin to address domestic intelligence by the FBI, etc. Some of their stuff is effective, some of it is a joke (they can't make up their minds whether to use state of the art technology or wiretapping equipment left over by Eliott Ness), but I think you can assume they have people embedded in almost every organization in the country.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.
They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.
"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.
In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.
"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.
"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."
The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."
The Post's investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.
The Post's online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.
Today's article describes the government's role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday's article describes the government's dependence on private contractors. Wednesday's is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.
Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. "Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, 'Okay, we've built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?' " he said.
CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he's begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said. "Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that."
In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. "Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers," he said.
Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. "I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to," he said.
Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country," he said. "The attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing."
Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.
Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can't conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.
Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.
Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.
In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn't include the Air Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a big "Welcome!" sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.
Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. (Photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)
Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.
This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.
Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.
At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.
The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.
Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.
With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.
With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.
While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.
The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn't have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.
The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.
And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI's rapid expansion.
When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte's office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.
Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.
But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.
The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.
There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It's too hard, and some agency heads don't really want to give up the systems they have. But there's some progress: "All my e-mail on one computer now," Leiter says. "That's a big deal."
To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become, just head west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport.
As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth's geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.
Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government's Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.
Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.
About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.
Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.
Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices "on the order of the pyramids," in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.
Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency's office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.
Construction for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)
It's not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it's also what is inside: banks of television monitors. "Escort-required" badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.
SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."
SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.
"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."
Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.
At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.
Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.
When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. "Like a zombie, it keeps on living" is how one official describes the sites.
The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. "It's the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it," said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI's assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. "I saw tremendous overlap."
Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.
When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. "I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!" he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.
Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington's bureaucracy. "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?" he said. "Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"
He's hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .
It's too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.
"Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?"
"Why does it have to be so bulky?"
"Why isn't it online?"
The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.
A new Defense Department office complex goes up in Alexandria. (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)
The ODNI's analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution was another publication, this one a daily online newspaper, Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of 22 culls more than two dozen agencies' reports and 63 Web sites, selects the best information and packages it by originality, topic and region.
Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be gumming up the national security machinery and blurring the lines of responsibility.
Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas.
And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.
"Frankly, it hasn't been brought together in a unified approach," CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.
"Cyber is tremendously difficult" to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. "Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf." Why? "Because it's funded, it's hot and it's sexy."
Anti-Deception Technologies
From avatars and lasers to thermal cameras and fidget meters, this multimedia gallery takes a look at some of the latest technologies being developed by the government and private companies to thwart terrorists. Launch Gallery »
Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people and wounding 30. In the days after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan's increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk "adverse events." He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence.
But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902's commander had decided to turn the unit's attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI's 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.
The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The assessment "didn't tell us anything we didn't know already," said the Army's senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.
Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.
Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.
These are called Special Access Programs - or SAPs - and the Pentagon's list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.
"There's only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs - that's God," said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration's nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.
Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.
One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.
Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. "I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value," he said. "The DNI ought to do something similar."
The ODNI hasn't done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community. But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.
Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.
Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.
In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.
That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.
As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.
Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.
These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.
"There are so many people involved here," NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.
"Everyone had the dots to connect," DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. "But I hadn't made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility."
And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn't the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. "We didn't follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence," White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. "Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation."
Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.
More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.
The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.
More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.
Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.
Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
This article lends significant support for my theory about Obama being an SVR mole and is consistent with everything else I know.
Lugar, one of the leading globalists in the Senate, was a mentor for then-Senator Barack Obama during a controversial three-day visit they made to Russia and Eastern Europe in 2005. ...During the visit, Russian authorities detained Obama and Lugar, threatened to search their plane, and examined their passports. Strangely, an official report from Lugar’s office about the trip ignored the incident. ...Obama was quoted as being nonchalant about his detention with Lugar in Russia, saying, "We were in a lounge with a locked door at one point. It wasn’t the gulag." However, one account said that Lugar and Obama were kept in "an uncomfortably stuffy room" for three hours and "allowed out onto an adjoining porch area only after they surrendered their passports."
This was simply a convenient means of arranging a meeting, similar to many of Obama's "disappearances" in gyms and other places during the Presidential campaign. I don't think our intelligence services are so clueless they don't realize it.
In regard to serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee together, Bloomberg reported that Lugar had "sought out Obama" for a spot on the committee shortly after Obama won his seat in 2004, and that their relationship was so deep that Lugar came to be considered an informal senior adviser to Obama after his election to the presidency.
Like Strobe Talbot, I've long suspected Lugar (for at least 15 years maybe longer) of being a Russian mole. That Lugar was trying to bring a complete neophyte onto the committee is simply standard operating procedure for communists -- to promote their own to every influential position. For instance, this is how Elena Kagan got to be head of Harvard Law, as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.
It's unfortunate that so few people are willing to look at the evidence. The entire "globalist" movement is Soviet inspired and was promoted initially by the old KGB and now the SVR. Anyone associated with it is suspect, but anyone on the Senate Foreign Relations committee is triple suspect.
There is too much to quote in this article. I recommend reading all of it. And putting the pieces together. Sooner, rather than later, because we are under open assault as a society by the communists, who believe they are about to win after so many years of trying. Believe it or not, I consider this threat much greater than the Islamists (who are actually pawns of the communists).
When 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked President Obama’s new arms treaty with Russia as a dangerous trap, Republican Senator Richard Lugar came to the defense of the Democratic president and attacked Romney as “misinformed.” But Lugar’s desperate effort to save Obama’s controversial treaty, whose passage has been badly damaged by revelations of Russian spying, doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Lugar, one of the leading globalists in the Senate, was a mentor for then-Senator Barack Obama during a controversial three-day visit they made to Russia and Eastern Europe in 2005.
During the visit, Russian authorities detained Obama and Lugar, threatened to search their plane, and examined their passports. Strangely, an official report from Lugar’s office about the trip ignored the incident.
Not only is Lugar very close to Obama, one of his key congressional staffers is Carl Meacham, who used to work for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.
The push for ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which requires 67 votes for passage, has been complicated by the recent arrests—and quick release—of 10 Russian agents acting on behalf of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service which serves as the successor to the old Soviet KGB. The Hill newspaper noted that court documents in the case demonstrated that agents “were asked by Moscow to collect information about the treaty” in advance of a 2009 trip by Obama to Russia, during which the new President “called on Moscow to stop viewing America as an adversary,” as the British publication the Guardian put it.
One document in the spy case reveals that Moscow had “requested information on the U.S. position with respect to a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, Afghanistan, and Iran’s nuclear weapons program.” It said Russian agents were directed to obtain information on “[Russia] policy team members,” but the names of four Obama Administration officials who were targeted in this effort were deleted.
The document says Moscow also wanted its agents to obtain information from sources “close to State Department, government, major think tanks.”
One of the documents says the Russians were interested in sources “who are in, or able to infiltrate, United States policy-making circles,” and that one of the Russian agents “met with an employee of the U.S. Government with regard to nuclear weapons research.”
The documents suggest that the Russian or U.S. position on New START could have been affected by the activities of the Russian intelligence agents.
Lugar favors the controversial treaty with Russia, but has also adopted a left-wing approach to relations with Communist Cuba, having issued a report (PDF) in 2009 urging the abandonment of the bipartisan policy of isolating and using economic sanctions against the terror-supporting dictatorship. The report was written by Meacham, who is officially in charge of Latin American affairs at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A frequent traveler to Russia and the old Soviet Union, Lugar is one of the most left-wing Republican U.S. senators on foreign policy issues, having proudly accepted campaign contributions from the pro-world government group, Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS). Lugar even gave the group an interview, advocating passage of another treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The CGS, which changed its name from World Federalist Association, is targeting Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker as a possible vote for the new Russian treaty. A vote could come in the next two weeks.
The treaty, signed on April 8 by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, would obligate both nations to cap their strategic nuclear weapons at 1,550 warheads, a one-third reduction, but it would not inhibit the development or deployment of tactical or shorter range nuclear weapons.
What’s more, in statements in the preamble to the pact, the two sides recognize “the interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defense arms” and how “this interrelationship will become more important as strategic arms are reduced.” Romney says—and the National Reviewagrees—that this linkage is a major concession to the Russians that could limit U.S. missile defenses.
Romney declared, “New START impedes missile defense, our protection from nuclear-proliferating rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. Its preamble links strategic defense with strategic arsenal. It explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites. And Russia has expressly reserved the right to walk away from the treaty if it believes that the United States has significantly increased its missile defense capability.”
While opposition has emerged and is growing to the New START, foreign aid to Russia, supposedly for the purposes of dismantling weapons of mass destruction, has continued under Republican and Democratic Administrations.
In fact, the trip by Lugar and Obama to Russia in 2005 was designed to promote the scandal-ridden “Cooperative Threat Reduction Program” (CTR), also known as the Nunn-Lugar program for its original Senate sponsors. Lugar and Obama co-sponsored a follow-up program.
However, reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveal that some of the funds, which now total over $6 billion, have been used to destroy obsolete weapons that Moscow was going to replace with high-tech arms and provide salaries for Russian scientists.
In response to Romney’s criticism of the New START, Steven Pifer and Strobe Talbott of the Brookings Institution acknowledged in a follow-up column in The Washington Post that Romney is correct that the measure “does not limit tactical nuclear weapons, where Russia has a significant numerical advantage.” But they nevertheless said that because some U.S. allies which are directly threatened by Russian tactical nuclear weapons support the treaty, the U.S. should do so as well.
Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, is director of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control Initiative, while Talbott, deputy secretary of state in the Clinton Administration from 1994 to 2001, is president of Brookings. Talbott surfaced in the blockbuster book, Comrade J, based on the revelations of a Russian master spy, as having been a trusted contact of the Russian intelligence service. He denied serving as an agent of Russia.
But in 1994, when Talbott was being considered for his State Department post in the Clinton Administration, it was disclosed that while he was a correspondent for Time magazine in Moscow, he had maintained a relationship with Victor Louis, a Soviet “journalist” who was actually a Soviet KGB intelligence agent.
Lugar is considered one of Talbott’s closest friends in the U.S. Senate. For his part, Obama’s old Senate website had posted an article saying that Lugar was “helping” Obama in foreign policy and that they had “formed a political joint venture and mutual admiration society.”
In regard to serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee together, Bloomberg reported that Lugar had “sought out Obama” for a spot on the committee shortly after Obama won his seat in 2004, and that their relationship was so deep that Lugar came to be considered an informal senior adviser to Obama after his election to the presidency.
Other Senators are clearly not so excited about Obama’s foreign policy “experience” and dealings with the Russians.
A June 29 letter to Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from all the panel’s Republicans—except for Lugar—says the Russians have a history of violating arms control treaties and that more time is needed to examine New START.
On Wednesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee holds a secret hearing on whether Russian compliance with the treaty can be verified. On Thursday, the Foreign Relations Committee holds an open hearing on the treaty.
On the matter of Obama’s foreign policy “experience,” before becoming President, he reportedly authored a college thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. But no copy has ever turned up. It was subsequently revealed by The New York Times that he wrote a 1983 article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” for a campus newsmagazine at Columbia University, not only calling for support of the nuclear weapons freeze movement but going beyond that to calling for the abandonment of specific weapons systems and a general goal of a “nuclear free world.”
The nuclear freeze campaign was a Soviet-orchestrated effort to prevent the U.S. from responding militarily to a Soviet nuclear weapons buildup. It failed, as then-President Reagan pursued a military build-up and deployment of new nuclear weapons in Europe.
Considering his views on the old Soviet Union and Russia, it is perhaps not surprising that Obama was quoted as being nonchalant about his detention with Lugar in Russia, saying, “We were in a lounge with a locked door at one point. It wasn’t the gulag.”
However, one account said that Lugar and Obama were kept in “an uncomfortably stuffy room” for three hours and “allowed out onto an adjoining porch area only after they surrendered their passports.”
In a piece titled, “Hoosier Daddy,” a reference to Lugar being from Indiana, the Washington Monthly noted that, after Lugar became Obama’s mentor in the Senate, the two men “grew closer” during the 2005 Russian tour. Lugar had said, however, in regard to their detention, “it makes you wonder who really is running the country.”
Five years later, there can still be no doubt. It is under the iron grip of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who had served as president before allowing the current president and his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, to take over the position.
Not only does Russia continues its spying operations, many of them based at the United Nations in New York, but it has launched a massive anti-American propaganda effort through the global Russia Today television channel, with correspondents in New York and Washington, D.C. It recently ran an interview with a leader of the New Black Panther Party alleging that Fox News has been “stirring up racial fears” in the U.S.
Still, Lugar remains completely devoted to negotiations, agreements and a close relationship with Putin’s Russia. While he posted an attack on Romney for opposing the New START, a search of Lugar’s website finds no demands for any investigations to determine what influence the Russian intelligence operations may have had on the final terms in the treaty. Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org
It's somewhat striking what makes it into news stories and what doesn't. First read the obit that reporter Pete Early wrote about a KGB defector, Sergei Tretyakov, whom he also wrote the biography for (“Comrade J.: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War”). Then read the New York Times obit. Or the Telegraph Obit. Or the second Telegraph Obit. Or the AP Obit. Mostly the same, but small, significant differences. Only the last story mentions this remark by Tretyakov's wife:
"Helen Tretyakov said her husband warned U.S. authorities when he defected that Russia was expanding deep-cover operations. 'He was aware that the part of the SVR budget for supporting illegals [deep cover moles smuggled into the U.S.] increased dramatically in the 1990s...' "
Which coincides nicely with Obama's rise to power.
The cause of death is being unofficially reported as "natural", but you may note that the FBI is investigating his death, and it happened on June 13, only weeks before the Russian spies were arrested. Personally, I'm putting my money on Putin exacting revenge. It's going on all over the world right now.
What's somewhat touching about this story is that Tretyakov defected because he could no longer tolerate the evil in Russia, and he loved freedom. Would that I could say the same thing about Obama and his ilk.
Side note: Tretyakov names Strobe Talbot under Clinton as a "very valuable intelligence asset". During Clinton's presidency, I always suspected Talbot of being a spy for the Soviets. Call me prescient. Now I'm calling Obama a spy for the Russians. Call me daring.
"[Sergei Tretyakov] rose quickly through the ranks to become the second-in-command of the KGB in New York City between 1995 to 2000. As such, he oversaw all Russian spy operations against the US and its allies in New York City and within the United Nations.
"Sergei was called “the most important spy for the U.S. since the collapse of the Soviet Union” by an FBI official in my book. Unfortunately, because much of what he said is still being used by U. S. counter-intelligence officers, it will be years before the true extent of his contribution can be made public — if ever."
"I was struck at how different Sergei was from U.S. traitors. Walker and Ames were motivated by greed and money. ...Sergei often told me that Americans were naive because they took freedoms for granted and did not understand how unique our lives here are compared to life in an oppressive nation, such as Russia..."
"Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB had a list of three main adversaries: (1.) The United States (2.) NATO and (3.) China. After the KGB was disbanded and the SVR was formed, Sergei said a new edict came down announcing that the SVR had three main targets: (1.) The United States (2.) NATO and (3.) China.
"...Ms. Tretyakov gave the cause of death as coronary arrest, and that she had asked her husband’s friends not to reveal the fact of his death until an autopsy could be performed under the supervision of the F.B.I. ..."
"...he delivered 5,000 top-secret cables to American intelligence officials and, in debriefings by the F.B.I. and C.I.A., provided detailed information about Russian operations in New York, including the names of contacts.
“My defection was the major failure of the Russian intelligence, probably in its whole history,” Mr. Tretyakov told NPR, the public radio network, in 2008. "
"...He said he switched sides because he had lost faith in the leaders who succeeded Mikhail S. Gorbachev. “I saw firsthand what kind of people were and are running the country,” he wrote, saying he believed they had enriched themselves and a handful of cronies. “I came to an ultimate conclusion that it became immoral to serve them.”
"...In a caustic aside, he noted that he had never met with the former Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, partly because they worked in different parts of the world, and partly because Mr. Putin was “never successful in intelligence,” and therefore never worked at headquarters. “He was always kept in a provincial K.G.B. station in a low and unimportant position,” he said.
Mr. Tretyakov also said that he defected so that his daughter might have a better life.
“No one recruited me,” he wrote. “No one pitched me. No one convinced me to do what I did.” He theorized that American intelligence officials never approached him because he was seen as an old-style K.G.B. officer.
Mr. Tretyakov emphasized that he had not defected for money and had never asked to be paid for his services. On the contrary, he said, his career in the S.V.R. was flourishing, and by defecting he gave up substantial assets in cash and real estate in Russia.
...To Mr. Earley, Mr. Tretyakov described his work with several operatives he recruited or placed. The recruits included a former member of the Canadian Parliament, a top-ranking verification expert at the International Atomic Energy Agency and a former United Nations official whom Mr. Tretyakov said he installed in the Oil for Food Program, created to allow Iraq to sell oil but not acquire weapons.
That former official, he said, diverted some $500 million from the program to the government of Boris N. Yeltsin and Mr. Putin.
...by the time he turned his coat had been running all Russia's espionage operations at the UN for two years.
...He named Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state under President Clinton, as an "extremely valuable intelligence source" who had been "tricked and manipulated by Russian intelligence". Talbott has always denied any wrongdoing. Tretyakov also said that Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister who died in 1978, had been a KGB target, though he did not confirm whether she had been secured as an informant for the spy agency.
...It was shortly after he started providing information, for example, that American agents began surveillance of the ring of "deep cover" Russian spies who were recently arrested (though since his death Tretyakov's widow has said her husband was responsible for revealing their identities).
...His wife said he had died of a heart attack, though an autopsy has been carried out under FBI supervision. Before he died Tretyakov, for one, did not think he or his family had anything to fear, saying: "We don't think that it's in the interests of the Russian government to come after us."
...He said he unmasked dozens of foreigners working as Russian agents, including several ambassadors and UN representatives, but despite the sweeping accusations, no one cited by Tretyakov has been charged with espionage. Critics accused him of exaggeration, and until his death Tretyakov continued to use his name and lived more or less openly.
"...His widow, Helen Tretyakov, told the station he died of natural causes. She said she announced his death Friday to prevent Russian intelligence from claiming responsibility or "flattering themselves that they punished Sergei."
Helen Tretyakov said her husband warned U.S. authorities when he defected that Russia was expanding deep-cover operations.
"He was aware that the part of the SVR budget for supporting illegals increased dramatically in the 1990s," she told WTOP. The SVR is the Russian intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
However, she said there was no direct link between his information and the 10 people arrested last month as Russian spies near Boston, New York and Washington.
"It wasn't him who disclosed the names of these people," she said.
...Tretyakov said he found it immoral to continue helping the Russian government.
"I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not very emotional. I'm not a Boy Scout," Tretyakov said. "And finally in my life, when I defected, I did something good in my life. Because I want to help United States."
Which was the title of a good book published in 1984, but below is a video, made in 1982 and nominated for an Emmy, on the history of KGB infiltration of the United States, with many interviews of actual KGB agents, defectors, etc. If you have never been exposed to this stuff, and you're like most people, I'm betting you'll be shocked at how extensive the Soviet networks were -- and still are.
For instance, by 1980 they had 500 agents in the United Nations, filling all the top posts. But among their agents outside the U.N. were many more Americans than I can list here. The entire 2 hour and 10 minute video is fascinating, but if you want to get a visceral sense of it all, jump to 1:44:45 to hear Congressional testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, an American who worked as a Soviet spy and who came in from the cold because she suspected the Soviets were about to kill her. She describe in great detail how the Soviets were getting information from practically every department of the United States government, all through the 1940's.
As I said, there's a lot of information in this video (no matter how fleeting) indicating how the Soviets and communists recruited Americans, arranged meetings, maintained cell organizations, planned disinformation campaigns, etc., etc.
Now couple this with recent reports that KGB spy rings were never disrupted after the fall of the Soviet Union, and they've actually been expanded under Putin.
If you get through the entire show, ask yourself: how likely is it that any man who was raised by communist parents and grandparents, and mentored by a man who was known to be under KGB control, and who has associated his entire life with communists, and who continues to associate with communists -- how likely is it that man might now be under the control of the KGB's heir, the Russian SVR?
That man, of course, is the current President of the United States.
Below, a Pajamas op-ed that provides an excellent example of the rampant dishonesty in climate science: an article published by the National Academy of Science purports to assert the credibility of global warming based on number of articles published by any "researcher", concluding that 98% of real climate scientists support global warming. Everyone else are quacks. In a further dishonest slap, the online version provides a link to a blacklist of the 496 dissenting scientists whose opinions we should avoid.
The analysis goes something like this:
WITCH #1
Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
WITCH #2
Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.
WITCH #3
Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time!
WITCH #1
Round about the caldron go;
ALL
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
WITCH #2
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
WITCH #2
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
You get the idea.
The article was written by William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider.
A biologist, an electrical engineer, an activist, and a professional liar, who proceed to assert that anyone who isn't a full-fledged climate scientist is a liar.
Are they doing this tongue in cheek?
Their basis is the number of publications, and the number of times those publications were cited by other professional liars.
One could make the same case for the validity of flat Earth theories in the year 1200, based on the number of proponents in the Holy Roman Church.
The "paper" in this Diet of Worms was co-authored by Bishop Stephen Schneider at the Diocese of Stanford, so I suppose one must consider the source. But get this conclusion:
Publication and citation analyses are not perfect indicators of researcher credibility, but they have been widely used in the natural sciences for comparing research productivity, quality, and prominence (21–24).
Of course, a researcher into the mating habits of Euplanaria Tigrina likely has no worms to grind.
Furthermore, these methods tend to correlate highly with other estimates of research quality, expertise, and prominence (21–26). Furthermore, these methods explicitly estimate credibility to other academics, which might not directly translate to credibility inbroader discourse, polls suggest that about 70% of the American public generally trust scientists’ opinions on the environment, making this assessment broadly relevant (27).
Regarding the influence of citation patterns, we acknowledge that it is difficult to quantify potential biases of self-citation or clique citation in the analysis presented here.
You see what's coming? They acknowledge it...
However, citation analysis research suggests that the potential of these patterns to influence results is likely to decline as sample size of researchers, possible cliques, and papers analyzed for citations considered increases (22, 25–28).
In other words, you get enough monkeys...
By selecting an expansive sample of 1,372 researchers and focusing our analysis only on the researchers’ four most-cited papers, we have designed our study to minimize the potential influence of these patterns.
...and the probability of an asthmatic gibbon declines. Yes, an expansive sample will solve everything...
Ultimately, of course, scientific confidence is earned by the winnowing process of peer review and replication of studies over time. In the meanwhile, given the immediacy attendant to the state of debate over perception of climate science...
You can see the full method of a self-licking ice cream cone at work here. What's left out of the equation? How about
3.) Originality and independent thought;
2.) Quality of Reasoning;
1.) Money. Prestige. Influence.
Did 98% of the "credible" scientists do anything original, or just copy the other lemmings?
Did 98% of the "credible" scientists do any good thinking, or did they offer just faux research like counting someone else's publications?
Did 98% of the "credible" scientists get government grants for their research, and would that lifestyle be jeopardized by expressing a dissenting opinion?
After Climategate, even I was a little shocked at how corrupt the profession of science has become. Theoretical physics has long been in a state of complete collapse, but we may now be at the cusp of collapse in applied physics, which too often today mimicks the epistemology of astronomy under the ancient Ptolemies, who contrived a system of circular reasoning to preserve their system of circular reasoning -- that the Heavens revolved around the Earth, not the other way around. So it is with science today, when facts come into conflict with theories and political agendas.
The National Academy of Sciences, in its official journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has just published a list of scientists whom it claims should not be believed on the subject of global warming. I am number 38 on the list. The list of 496 is in descending order of scientific credentials.
Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society, is number 3 on the list. Dyson is a friend of mine and is one of the creators of relativistic quantum field theory; most physicists think he should have shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynman. MIT professor Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist who is also a member of the National Academy, is number 4. Princeton physics professor William Happer, once again a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is number 6.
I’m in good company.
The list is actually available only online. The published article, which links to the list, argues that the skeptical scientists — the article calls us “climate deniers,” trying to equate us with Holocaust deniers — have published less in climate “science” than believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
True.
But if the entire field of climate “science” is suspect, if the leaders of the field of climate “science” are suspected of faking their results and are accused of arranging for their critics’ papers to be rejected by “peer-reviewed” journals, then lack of publication in climate “science” is an argument for taking us more seriously than the leaders of the climate “science.”
Freeman Dyson, for example, was not trained as a physicist but as a mathematician. His contribution to quantum field theory was applying his mathematical skills to showing that Feynman’s work was mathematically rigorous and mathematically equivalent to another formulation due to Julian Schwinger (who shared the Nobel with Feynman). Freeman has spent the fifty years after this work switching from field to field, always making important contributions to these fields, and making them precisely because he has looked at the evidence from a different point of view.
Dick Lindzen actually is an insider in real climate science, but he is an insider who can’t be bought, an insider who follows the evidence rather than the grant money.
Will Happer is mainly an experimental atomic physicist, but a physicist who has a decades-old reputation for investigating extraordinary claims in all areas of physics. Will was one of the experimentalists who exposed the cold fusion scam a number of years ago.
As for myself, I’m a cosmologist, with a special interest in the anthropic principle, as my National Academy of Sciences security police dossier correctly notes. Twenty odd years ago, I co-authored a book, published by Oxford University Press, on the anthropic principle. As my co-author and I pointed out, the essence of the anthropic principle is eliminating human bias from the interpretation of observations, and we focused mainly on eliminating such bias from cosmology.
But human bias is human bias. I myself have looked at some of the raw data from surface stations that measure the Earth’s temperature. The raw data are from selected sites in the USA, in New Zealand, in Australia, and in Sweden. I selected these sites because I’m reasonably sure they will not have bias due to changing human habitation, or human wars, or human politics. These sites show no warming in the twentieth century. So I have to conclude that we don’t even know if there was any warming on Earth in the twentieth century.
Notice that I am not saying that there has been no warming, just that the available raw data that I’ve personally been able to check do not show it. Until all the raw temperature data are placed online, so the data can be checked by anybody, a rational person has to suspend belief in global warming, to say nothing of AGW.
The official government adjusted data for these sites do show a warming trend. All the warming is in the “corrections.” Sorry, I don’t buy it. Especially from “scientists” who are known to “correct’ their raw data to “hide the decline.”
There have been calls to silence the 496 scientists on the list. Besides “climate deniers,’ we have been called “traitors.” We all know the penalty for treason.
So far, no federal agents have come to pick me up. But nowhere in Mein Kampf does Adolf Hitler call for the extermination of the Jews. Hitler does repeatedly refer to the Jews as “tuberculosis bacilli.” What does one want to do with tuberculosis bacilli?
I’m an enemy of the state. It’s an honor.
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press) and the author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity both published by Doubleday.
