American Intelligence Has Become a Kafkaesque Bureaucracy

The expansion of the United States security system, brought to light by a Washington Post investigation, could be poisonous to democracy.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, the most traumatizing attack on American soil ever known, the American intelligence system has more than doubled in size: Fifty-thousand reports produced each year, expenses culminating at $75 billion, a community of 850,000 people. An investigation two years in the making by the Washington Post takes, for the first time, a comprehensive look at the extreme growth of the U.S. security system. There would be nothing to worry about if the White House and Congress had not lost control of the phenomenon. James Clapper recognizes this: “There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs [Special Access Programs] – that’s God.” James Clapper isn’t some nobody; he is Barack Obama’s nominee for the new director of national intelligence.

Plenty of causes explain this anarchical development. One major cause is the senseless way in which the American bureaucracy works, where each barony defends its prerogatives and its budget augmentations to the detriment of a concerted action. Declining superpower status and the confrontation of new, vaguer threats has destabilized America. In response, it has become a security state as a reassuring response to the international jihad. It follows a neo-conservative ideology which has allowed the belief that American democracy itself is not enough and that it could become lost in the illusion of omniscience and omnipotence. It was believed that creating a Department of Homeland Security to give coherence to the fight against terrorism would be enough, but intelligence depends not only on the amount of data accumulated, but also its quality. The recent killings at Fort Hood, orchestrated by a jihadist officer in the heart of the Army, demonstrated the painful way these systemic gaps in intelligence persist, and that the United States is no safer today than it was a decade ago.

Afraid of coming off as naïve pacifists, Democrats and Republicans now see it as their duty to reaffirm the role of policy. Left to itself, without a strategic plan, the intelligence field could become toxic to democracy.