The Washington Post published a report on Monday, July 19, about the Intelligence Community, in public and private sectors. The report is titled Top Secret America, and it has created a huge stir. Heavies in the intelligence world have already began to take issue with its findings. Among Top Secret America’s numerous claims is that the Intelligence Community, first receives the status of a proper noun and second is becoming rapidly disconnected, petty, inefficient and ineffective.
The portrait Top Secret America paints is not the greatest
The Washington Post spent two years compiling Top Secret America. The amount of agencies, bureaus and contractors working on intelligence has grown exponentially since September 2001. The intelligence field is about secrecy, and also the total cost and activities of all these groups may not be knowable. The report also claims that the intelligence community is not well suited to efficiency, consensus, and lacks enough focus to be truly effictive. The piece contains references to a recent interview with Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, who bemoans the lack of focus and clear information from the intelligence field.
Intelligence Community responds
There was a response from the intelligence business almost right away. The national Director of Intelligence, David Gompert, easily issued a press release that condemned the report for not being truly reflective of the Intelligence Community, and the community itself was consistently working on improving itself.
What the results of the report can be
It is hard to tell what effect the report will have. The nature of the intelligence business is that it is clandestine. If a spy operation goes well, the success of the mission might never see the light of day. There have, of course, been some embarrassing, miserable, almost tragically comic failures . The Bay of Pigs invasion, WMDs that were never discovered in Iraq, etc. The authorities were alerted about the Christmas bomber, and also the only reason he didn’t succeed was his bomb didn’t go off and passengers decided to beat him into submission. The Fort Hood shooter was a Major within the US Army, and he had been in communication for months with Anti-American Muslim groups. Despite the public failures, some public successes would possibly restore a lot of faith in the system.
Read more on this topic here
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ (PDF)
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