Top Secret America

by Dana Priest and William M. ArkinStaff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report

July 19, 2010
from WashingtonPost Website

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.

An alternative geography
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the top-secret world created to respond to the terrorist attacks has grown into an unwieldy enterprise spread over 10,000 U.S. locations. Launch Photo Gallery
 

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 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, isCarahsoft, 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."

Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasanallegedly 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.

 

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
 

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 902^nd, 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 902^nd 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. Elizabeth's 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.

 Video

 Top Secret America

Washington Post Reveals Massive Outsourced US Intelligence System

 

Top Secret America

La humanitat en perill

per Noam Chomsky 4 de juny de, 2013

de TomDispatch Lloc Web

Noam Chomsky és professor emèrit de l'Institut al Departament de Lingüística i Filosofia del MIT. H i és l'autor de nombroses obres de major venda polítics, entre ells, Esperances i perspectives , que el futur , i més recentment (amb David Barsamian entrevistador), Power Systems: Converses sobre el Global aixecaments democràtics i els nous desafiaments a imperi nord-americà   .

No va passar molt de temps. En el període immediatament posterior a la caiguda de la "arma victòria", la bomba atòmica, sobre dues ciutats japoneses a l'agost de 1945, pors i fantasies nord-americans  es van tornar salvatges .

Gairebé immediatament, els nord-americans van començar a replantejar-se a si mateixos com a víctimes potencials de la bomba.

En els escenaris de destrucció d'omplir diaris, revistes, programes de ràdio, i la imaginació privades, les nostres ciutats estaven envoltats amb cercles concèntrics de destrucció i de fins a  10 milions de persones als EUA (imatge a sota) i desenes de milions en un altre lloc una mort horrible en una pocs dies de batalla imaginat.

Fins i tot la victòria, quan es tractava en aquests primers anys de la postguerra dels somnis futuristes de destrucció, tenia l'aspecte de la derrota. I les dues històries americanes en temps de guerra - de triomfalisme enllà de l'imaginable i cendres - van resultar ser incapaços de conviure en les mateixes formes.

Pel que la bomba va fugir de la pel·lícula de guerra (en el qual essencialment mai va fer una aparició) per a la pel·lícula de ciència ficció en el qual destaquen els complements de tot tipus - superarmas exòtiques i rèptils radioactius i altres monstres mutants - va destruir el planeta, la humanitat en perill d'extinció, i perseguit els joves a cada sala de cinema drive-in al país.

Encara en 1995, aquestes dues històries, al final triomfalista de "la guerra bona" i l'inici desastrós de l'era atòmica, encara no podien habitar el mateix espai. En aquest any del 50 aniversari, una exposició prevista a l' Aire i l'Espai Museu Nacional que se suposava per aparellar el fusellatge brillant de l'Enola Gay, el B-29 que porta a la primera bomba atòmica d'Hiroshima, amb les restes caramel·litzada de la carmanyola d'un escolar ( "No hi ha rastre de Reiko Watanabe mai es va trobar")serien cancel·lats .

La indignació dels grups de veterans i la dreta republicana va ser simplement massa, el malestar encara massa fort.

Fins a 1945, per descomptat, l'apocalipsi havia estat la característica de la Bíblia , i "últims temps" la província de Déu (i potser una branca de florida de la polpa lit crida ciència ficció), però no de la humanitat.

Des de llavors, ha estat la nostra, i com es va veure després, que estaven actuant de forma apocalíptica de maneres que no eren evidents en 1945, que no estan adjuntes a una sola arma meravella, i que segueixen sent difícils d'entendre i fins i tot bregar ara .

Amb això en ment, i amb gràcies a Javier Navarro , hem adaptat  entrevista en vídeo fet amb  TomDispatch regular de  Noam Chomsky per què , l'associació Navarro va ajudar a fundar.

Reelaborat pel mateix Chomsky, ofereix els seus pensaments en un futur perillós que és clarament a les nostres mans. tom

La humanitat en perill  - la trajectòria de Desastres - per  Noam Chomsky

Quin és el futur probable de portar?

Una postura raonable podria ser tractar de mirar a l'espècie humana des de l'exterior.

Així que imagina que ets un observador extraterrestre que està tractant d'esbrinar el que està succeint aquí o, per al cas, imagina que ets un historiador dins de 100 anys - suposant que hi hagi cap historiadors d'aquí a 100 anys, el que no és obvi - i que està mirant cap enrere en el que està succeint avui dia. Veuries alguna cosa bastant notable.

Per a la primera vegada en la història de l'espècie humana, hem desenvolupat clarament la capacitat de destruir nosaltres mateixos. Això ha estat cert des de 1945. En l'actualitat està sent finalment va reconèixer que hi ha més processos a llarg termini com la destrucció del medi ambient que porten a la mateixa direcció, potser no a la destrucció total, però, almenys, a la destrucció de la capacitat per portar una vida decent.

I hi ha altres perills com les pandèmies, que tenen a veure amb la globalització i la interacció.

Així que hi ha processos en curs i institucions adequades en el lloc, igual que els sistemes d'armes nuclears, el que podria conduir a un seriós cop a, o potser la terminació de, una existència organitzada.

Com destruir un planeta sense donar cop

La pregunta és:

Què estan fent les persones al respecte?

Res d'això és un secret. És tot perfectament oberta. De fet, vostè ha de fer un esforç per no veure-ho.

Hi ha hagut una sèrie de reaccions. Hi ha aquells que estan tractant de fer alguna cosa sobre aquestes amenaces, i d'altres que estan actuant per escalar-les. Si ens fixem en el que són, aquest futur historiador o un observador extraterrestre veurien cosa estranya.

Tractant de mitigar o superar aquestes amenaces són les societats menys desenvolupats, les poblacions indígenes, o les restes d'elles, les societats tribals i les primeres nacions al Canadà. No estan parlant de guerra nuclear, però desastre ambiental, i que realment estan tractant de fer alguna cosa.

De fet, tothom - Austràlia, Índia, Amèrica del Sud - Hi ha batalles passant, de vegades les guerres. A l'Índia, és una gran guerra per la destrucció ambiental directe, amb les societats tribals que tracten de resistir a les operacions d'extracció de recursos que són extremadament perjudicials a nivell local, sinó també en les seves conseqüències generals. En les societats on les poblacions indígenes tenen una influència, molts estan prenent una posició ferma.

El més fort de qualsevol país en relació amb l'escalfament global és a Bolívia, que té una majoria indígena i requeriments constitucionals que protegeixen els drets de la natura "." 

Equador, que també té una gran població indígena, és l'únic exportador de petroli que conec on el govern està buscant ajuda per ajudar a mantenir que l'oli a terra, en lloc de la producció i exportació - i el sòl és on hauria d'estar.

El president de Veneçuela , Hugo Chávez , que va morir recentment i va ser objecte de burla, l'insult i l'odi a tot el món occidental, va assistir a una sessió de l'Assemblea General de l'ONU fa uns anys en el que va suscitar tota mena de burles per trucar a George W. Bush 01:00 diable. També va donar un discurs que no era prou interessant.

Per descomptat, Veneçuela és un important productor de petroli.

El petroli és pràcticament tot el seu producte intern brut. En aquest discurs, va advertir dels perills de l'ús excessiu de combustibles fòssils i va instar els països productors i consumidors per reunir-se i tractar de trobar formes de reduir l'ús de combustibles fòssils. Això va ser bastant sorprenent per part d'un productor de petroli. Vostè sap, ell era part de l'Índia, d'origen indígena. A diferència de les coses divertides que va fer, mai va ser tan sols ha informat aquest aspecte de les seves accions a l'ONU.

Així, en un extrem que té les societats indígenes, tribals que intenten aturar la carrera cap al desastre.

A l'altre extrem, les societats més poderoses, més rics en la història del món, com els Estats Units i Canadà, estan corrent a tota velocitat per destruir el medi ambient el més ràpidament possible. A diferència de l'Equador, i les societats indígenes a tot el món, volen extreure fins a l'última gota d'hidrocarburs de la terra amb la major rapidesa possible. 

Els dos partits polítics, el president Obama , els mitjans de comunicació i la premsa internacional semblen estar mirant cap endavant amb gran entusiasme al que ells anomenen "un segle d'independència energètica" per als Estats Units. La independència energètica és un concepte gairebé sense sentit, sinó que va posar a un costat. El que volen dir és: tindrem un segle en el qual per maximitzar l'ús de combustibles fòssils i contribuir a la destrucció del món.

I això és més o menys el cas a tot arreu. És cert que, quan es tracta de desenvolupament d'energies alternatives, Europa està fent alguna cosa. Mentrestant, els Estats Units, el país més ric i poderós de la història del món, és l'única nació entre els rellevants potser 100 que no té una política nacional per restringir l'ús de combustibles fòssils, que ni tan sols té objectius d'energia renovable .

No és perquè la població no ho vol. Els nord-americans estan molt a prop de la norma internacional en la seva preocupació per l'escalfament global. És estructures institucionals que bloquegen el canvi.

Els interessos comercials no el volen i són molt poderosa en la determinació de la política, per la qual cosa s'obté una gran bretxa entre l'opinió i la política en un munt de problemes, incloent aquest.

Així que això és el que el futur historiador - si n'hi ha - veuria. També pot llegir revistes científiques d'avui dia. Gairebé cada un té que obri una predicció més greu que l'anterior.

" El moment més perillós de la història "

L'altre problema és la guerra nuclear.

S'ha sabut durant molt de temps que si es produís un primer cop per una potència més gran, fins i tot amb represàlies, probablement destruiria la civilització només per les conseqüències-hivern nuclear que seguirien. Vostè pot llegir sobre ell en el Butlletí de Científics Atòmics . S'entén bé.

Pel que el perill sempre ha estat molt pitjor del que pensàvem que era.

Només hem passat el 50 aniversari de la Crisi dels Míssils, que va ser anomenat "el moment més perillós de la història" per l'historiador Arthur Schlesinger , assessor del president John F. Kennedy. La qual cosa va ser. Va ser una trucada molt a prop, i no és l'única vegada tampoc. En alguns aspectes, però, el pitjor aspecte d'aquests esdeveniments tristos és que les lliçons no han estat apreses.

El que va passar en la crisi dels míssils a l'octubre de 1962 s'ha engalanat per fer que sembli com si els actes de valor i consideració abundar. La veritat és que tot l'episodi era gairebé una bogeria.

Hi va haver un punt, ja que la crisi dels míssils estava arribant al seu punt màxim, quan el primer ministre soviètic Nikita Khrusxov va escriure a Kennedy oferint als solucionar-la mitjançant un anunci públic de la retirada dels míssils russos de Cuba i dels Estats Units míssils de Turquia.

En realitat, Kennedy ni tan sols sabia que els EUA tenien míssils a Turquia en el moment. Que estaven sent retirats de totes maneres, perquè estaven sent reemplaçats per submarins nuclears Polaris més letals, que eren invulnerables.

Així que aquesta va ser l'oferta. Kennedy i els seus assessors van considerar que era - i ho van rebutjar. En aquest moment, el mateix Kennedy va ser l'estimació de la probabilitat d'una guerra nuclear en un terç a la meitat.

Així que Kennedy estava disposat a acceptar un risc molt alt de destrucció massiva per tal d'establir el principi que nosaltres - i només nosaltres - tenir el dret de míssils ofensius més enllà de les nostres fronteres, de fet, en qualsevol lloc que ens agrada, no importa el que el risc per als altres - i per a nosaltres mateixos, si les coses cauen fora de control. Tenim aquest dret, però ningú més ho fa.

Kennedy va fer, però, accepta un acord secret per retirar els míssils els EUA ja es retirava, per tal que mai es va fer públic.

Khrusxov, en altres paraules, es va haver de retirar obertament els míssils russos, mentre que els EUA va retirar el seu secret els obsolets; és a dir, Khrusxov va haver de ser humiliat i Kennedy havia de mantenir la seva imatge de mascle . Ha lloat en gran mesura per això: el valor i sang freda sota amenaça, i així successivament.

L'horror de les seves decisions ni tan sols s'esmenta - tractar de trobar-lo al registre.

I afegir una mica més, un parell de mesos abans de la crisi va explotar els Estats Units havia enviat míssils amb caps nuclears a Okinawa. Aquests es dirigeixen a la Xina durant un període de gran tensió regional.

Bé, a qui li importa? Tenim el dret de fer el que vulguem en qualsevol part del món . Aquesta va ser una severa lliçó d'aquesta època, però hi havia altres per venir.

Deu anys després, el 1973, el secretari d'Estat Henry Kissinger diu una alerta nuclear d'alt nivell.

Era la seva manera d'advertir als russos no interferir en la guerra àrab-israeliana en curs i, en particular, per no interferir després d'haver informat als israelians que podien violar l'alto el foc els EUA i Rússia havíem acordat. Afortunadament, no va passar res.

Deu anys després, el president Ronald Reaganestava a l'oficina. Poc després va entrar a la Casa Blanca, ell i els seus assessors va tenir la Força Aèria inicia penetrar l'espai aeri rus per tractar d'obtenir informació sobre els sistemes d'alerta russos, Operació Able Archer .

En essència, aquests eren simulacres d'atac. Els russos no estaven segurs, alguns funcionaris d'alt nivell tement que això era un pas cap a una veritable primera vaga.

Afortunadament, no van reaccionar, encara que era una trucada propera. I segueix així ...

Què fer amb les crisis nuclears de l'Iran i Corea del Nord

De moment, la qüestió nuclear és regularment a les portades en els casos de Corea del Nord i l'Iran.

Hi ha maneres de fer front a aquestes crisis en curs. Potser no anava a funcionar, però almenys es podrien tractar. Són, però, ni tan sols es consideren, ni tan sols informat.

Prengui el cas de l'Iran , que es considera a Occident - no en el món àrab, no a Àsia - la més greu amenaça a la pau mundial. És un western obsessió , i és interessant per investigar les raons per a això, però vaig a deixar això de banda aquí.

Hi ha una manera de fer front a la suposadaamenaça més greu a la pau mundial? En realitat hi ha uns quants.

Una manera, una molt sensible, es va proposar fa un parell de mesos en una reunió dels països no alineats a Teheran. De fet, no eren més que reiterar una proposta que ha existit durant dècades, especialment pressionat per Egipte, i ha estat aprovat per l'Assemblea General de l'ONU.

La proposta és avançar cap a la creació d'una zona nuclear lliure d'armes a la regió . Això no seria la resposta per a tot, però seria un pas molt important cap endavant. I hi havia maneres de fer. Sota els auspicis de l'ONU, no anava a ser una conferència internacional a Finlàndia al desembre passat per tractar de posar en pràctica plans per traslladar cap a aquest.

Què va passar? No va a llegir sobre ell als diaris perquè no es va informar - només en revistes especialitzades.

A principis de novembre, l'Iran va accedir a assistir a la reunió. Un parell de dies després,Obama va cancel·lar la reunió , dient que el temps no estava bé. El Parlament Europeu va emetre una declaració demanant que continuï, igual que els estats àrabs. Res resultat.

Així que anem a passar cap a sancions cada vegada més dures contra la població iraniana - no fa mal al règim - i potser la guerra. Qui sap què passarà?

Al nord-est d'Àsia, que és el mateix tipus de coses. Corea del Nord podria ser el país més boig al món. És sens dubte un bon competidor per a aquest títol. Però té sentit per intentar esbrinar el que està en la ment de les persones quan estan actuant d'una manera boja.

Per què ells es comporten de la manera que ho fan? Imagineu a nosaltres mateixos en la seva situació. Imagineu el que va significar en els anys de la Guerra de Corea de la dècada de 1950 per al seu país per estar totalment anivellat, tot destruït per un gran superpotència, que, a més, es delectava en el que estava fent. Imagineu l'empremta que deixaria enrere.

Recordeu que els dirigents de Corea del Nord és probable que hagin llegit les revistes militars públics d'aquesta superpotència en aquest moment que explica que, atès que tota la resta a Corea del Nord havia estat destruïda, la Força Aèria va ser enviat per destruir les preses de Corea del Nord, enormes preses que controlat el subministrament d'aigua - un crim de guerra, per cert, per als quals les persones van ser penjats a Nuremberg. 

I aquests diaris oficials parlaven animadament del meravellós que era veure l'aigua que aboca a sota, l'excavació de les valls, i els asiàtics corrent per aquí tractant de sobreviure.

Les revistes es EXULTING en el que això significa per als "asiàtics", horrors més enllà de la nostra imaginació. Això significava la destrucció dels seus cultius d'arròs, que al seu torn significava fam i la mort. Com magnífica! No està en la nostra memòria, però és en la seva memòria .

Tornem a la present. Hi ha una interessant història recent. El 1993, Israel i Corea del Nord s'estaven movent cap a un acord en què Corea del Nord podria deixar d'enviar cap míssils o tecnologia militar a l'Orient Mitjà i Israel reconeixeria aquest país. El president Clintonva intervenir i ho va bloquejar.

Poc després d'això, en represàlia, Corea del Nord va dur a terme una prova de míssils de menor importància.

Els EUA i Corea del Nord va fer llavors arribar a un acord marc en 1994 que va posar fi al seu programa nuclear i era més o menys honrat per tots dos costats. Quan George W. Bush va arribar al poder, Corea del Nord tenia potser una arma nuclear i verificable no estava produint més. 

Bush va llançar immediatament la seva militarisme agressiu, amenaçador Corea del Nord - "eix del mal" i tot el que - pel que Corea del Nord va tornar a treballar en el seu programa nuclear.

De moment Bush va deixar el càrrec, que tenien entre vuit i 10 armes nuclears i un sistema de míssils, un altre gran fita neocon. Al mig, d'altres coses van succeir.

El 2005, els EUA i Corea del Nord arribat realment a un acord en què Corea del Nord era posar fi a totes les armes nuclears i el desenvolupament de míssils. A canvi, Occident, però sobretot els Estats Units, era proporcionar un reactor d'aigua lleugera per a les seves necessitats mèdiques i declaracions agressives finals. Ells llavors formar un pacte de no agressió i avançar cap a l'allotjament.

Va ser bastant prometedor, però gairebé immediatament Bush va soscavar la mateixa. Es va retirar l'oferta del reactor d'aigua lleugera i va iniciar programes per obligar els bancs per aturar la manipulació de qualsevol transacció de Corea del Nord, encara que siguin perfectament legals.

Els nord-coreans van reaccionar mitjançant la reactivació del seu programa d'armes nuclears. I aquesta és la forma en què ha estat passant. És ben sabut. Pot llegir-lo en el corrent principal de la beca recta, Americà.

El que diuen és: es tracta d'un règim bastant boig, però també després d'un tipus de política d'ull per ull. Fas un gest hostil i anem a respondre amb un gest boig dels nostres. Fas un gest complaent i ens va a correspondre d'alguna manera.

Darrerament, per exemple, s'han realitzat exercicis militars de Corea del Sud i els Estats Units sobre la península de Corea, que, des del punt de vista del Nord, han arribat a mirar amenaçant. Ens agradaria pensar que amenaçaven si estiguessin succeint al Canadà i dirigits a nosaltres.

En el curs d'aquests, els bombarders més avançats de la història, la cautela B-2 i B-52, estan duent a terme atacs amb bombes nuclears simulats a la dreta a les fronteres de Corea del Nord. 

Això sens dubte posa en marxa les alarmes del passat. Ells recorden que el passat, pel que estan reaccionant d'una manera molt agressiva, extrema.

Bé, el que ve a Occident de tot això és com 'boja' i com a 'terrible' els líders de Corea del Nord són .

Si, ells son. Però això no és tota la història, i aquesta és la forma en què el món se'n va. No és que no hi ha alternatives. Les alternatives no s'estan prenent. Això és perillós.

Així que si li preguntes al que el món es va a semblar, no és un quadre bonic. Llevat que les persones facin alguna cosa.

sempre que podem ...

vídeo

I el futur - Noam Chomsky

The eve of Dedtruction

by Noam Chomsky June 4, 2013

from TomDispatch Website

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including, Hopes and Prospects, Making the Future, and most recently (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire.

It didn’t take long. In the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the "victory weapon,” the atomic bomb, on two Japanese cities in August 1945, American fears and fantasies ran wild.

Almost immediately, Americans began to reconceive themselves as potential victims of the bomb.

In the scenarios of destruction that would populate newspapers, magazines, radio shows, and private imaginations, our cities were ringed with concentric circles of destruction and up to 10 million people in the U.S. (below image) and tens of millions elsewhere died horribly in a few days of imagined battle.

Even victory, when it came in those first post-war years of futuristic dreams of destruction, had the look of defeat. And the two wartime American stories - of triumphalism beyond imagining and ashes - turned out to be incapable of cohabiting in the same forms.

So the bomb fled the war movie (where it essentially never made an appearance) for the sci-fi flick in which stand-ins of every sort - alien superweapons and radioactive reptilian and other mutant monsters - destroyed the planet, endangered humanity, and pursued the young into every drive-in movie theater in the country.

As late as 1995, those two stories, the triumphalist end of "the Good War" and the disastrous beginning of the atomic age, still couldn’t inhabit the same space. In that 50th anniversary year, a planned exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum that was supposed to pair the gleaming fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that carried the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, with the caramelized remains of a schoolchild's lunchbox (“No trace of Reiko Watanabe was ever found”) would be cancelled.

The outrage from veterans' groups and the Republican right was just too much, the discomfort still too strong.

Until 1945, of course, the apocalypse had been the property of the Bible, and "end times" the province of God (and perhaps a budding branch of pulp lit called science fiction), but not of humanity.

Since then, it’s been ours, and as it turned out, we were acting apocalyptically in ways that weren’t apparent in 1945, that weren’t attached to a single wonder weapon, and that remain difficult to grasp and even deal with now.

With that in mind, and with thanks to Javier Navarro, we have adapted a video interview done with TomDispatch regular Noam Chomsky by What, the association Navarro helped to found.

Reworked by Chomsky himself, it offers his thoughts on a perilous future that is distinctly in our hands. Tom

Humanity Imperiled 
-   The Path to Disaster   -
by Noam Chomsky

What is the future likely to bring?

A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside.

So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now - assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious - and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction.

So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying

The question is:

What are people doing about it?

None of this is a secret. It’s all perfectly open. In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions. There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed.

Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada. They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world - Australia, India, South America - there are battles going on, sometimes wars. In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences. In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand.

The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the "rights of nature.” 

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it - and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil. He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting.

Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer.

Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product. In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use. That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer. You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background. Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster.

At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed. 

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call "a century of energy independence" for the United States. Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside. What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere. Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something. Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets.

It’s not because the population doesn’t want it. Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming. It’s institutional structures that block change.

Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian - if there is one - would see. He might also read today’s scientific journals. Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

"The Most Dangerous Moment in History"

The other issue is nuclear war.

It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow. You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It’s well understood.

So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called "the most dangerous moment in history" by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy’s advisor. Which it was. It was a very close call, and not the only time either. In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven’t been learned.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Actually, Kennedy hadn’t even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time. They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer. Kennedy and his advisors considered it - and rejected it. At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half.

So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we - and only we - have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others - and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public.

Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the U.S. secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image. He’s greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on.

The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned - try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa. These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares? We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world. That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert.

It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon. Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office. Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer.

Essentially, these were mock attacks. The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike.

Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call. And it goes on like that...

What to Make of the Iranian and North Korean Nuclear Crises

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran.

There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises. Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least you could try. They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the Case of Iran, which is considered in the West - not in the Arab world, not in Asia - the gravest threat to world peace. It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I’ll put that aside here.

Is there a way to deal with the supposedgravest threat to world peace? Actually there are quite a few.

One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran. In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region. That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward. And there were ways to proceed. Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this.

What happened? You won’t read about it in the newspapers because it wasn’t reported - only in specialist journals.

In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting. A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right. The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states. Nothing resulted.

So we’ll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population - it doesn’t hurt the regime - and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing. North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways.

Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply - a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. 

And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive.

The journals were exulting in what this meant to those "Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent!  It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

Let’s turn to the present. There’s an interesting recent history. In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.

Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test.

The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides. When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more. 

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea - "axis of evil" and all that - so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program.

By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement. In between, other things happened.

In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development. In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements. They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it. He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones.

The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program. And that’s the way it’s been going. It’s well known. You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship.

What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy. You make a hostile gesture and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own. You make an accommodating gesture and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North’s point of view, have got to look threatening. We’d think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us.

In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders. 

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past. They remember that past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way.

Well, what comes to the West from all this ishow 'crazy' and how 'awful' the North Korean leaders are.

Yes, they are. But that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going. It’s not that there are no alternatives. The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous.

So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture. Unless people do something about it.

We always can...

Video

What about The Future - Noam Chomsky