Imagine the world of the American Intelligence Community, or ADC, as a near-perfect closed system and a rare success story for Washington in the 21st century.
What are the chances of success? You spend $ 68 billion annually on a maze of 17 leading intelligence agencies. You build great headquarters for them. You are creating a global state of universal surveillance for centuries. You are eavesdropping on your citizens and collecting myriad data on their conversations. Your co-workers even turn into avatars and infiltrate video games so that no American in game mode shows a penchant for atrocities. Just in case, you collect information about visits to porn sites, so that someday, maybe, use it for blackmail. You distribute nude photographs of people to … just for the sake of lustful passion. Your employees use some aspects of the system you created to track down former lovers, and within your mysterious world, this act of spy art even takes on its own name - LOVEINT (love intelligence).
You are bugging foreign leaders and politicians all over the world. You bring in hundreds of thousands of corporate employees close to you, building the muscle power of the first-order corporate intelligence complex. You break into the data center backdoors of large Internet organizations to collect user accounts. You create new units within units, including constantly expanding secret military and intelligence teams within the army itself (which do not belong to the 17 departments mentioned). Your leaders are lying to Congress and the American people without a twinge of conscience or a shadow of doubt, as far as we can tell. Your misdeeds are examined by secret courts, which only listen to your version of events and regularly acquit you. At the same time, their decisions and a significant part of lawmaking are so secret that Americans cannot find out about them.
You make extraordinary efforts to ensure that the information about your community and the millions of documents you generate are not made public. You even have the legal power to silence American organizations and citizens who are able to speak up on topics that are unpleasant for you (but they cannot say that they are being silenced). You are no doubt spying on Congress. You hack into his computer systems. And if whistleblowers in your community are trying to sound the alarm and tell the American public something forbidden about your actions, you are prosecuting them under the anti-espionage law as if they were spies working for a foreign state (in a sense, they are is because you are treating the American people like the people of a foreign country). You do everything to cripple their lives, and if they slip out of your hands, you will relentlessly hunt for them even in the most distant corners of our planet.
And as for your top managers, when their time is running out, they freely fall into the highly profitable looking glass of the intelligence and corporate complex.
What They Didn't Know
Imagine the world of the American Intelligence Community, or ADC, as a near-perfect closed system and a rare success story for Washington in the 21st century. In the capital, which is being torn apart by sharp political divisions, almost everyone agrees on the absolute, total and ultimate importance of this "community" and what its leadership decides to ensure the country's peace and security.
Yes, everything you do, you do in the name of national security and the peace of the Americans. As it turns out, security is never enough, especially when it comes to one thing: the devilish ability of "terrorists" to threaten our country. By all accounts, terrorist attacks rank above shark attacks on the list of US threats since 9/11, but below almost everything else. And you take credit for that. You praise yourself that we have never had a "second 9/11". In addition, you take credit for exposing and thwarting numerous terrorist plans and conspiracies against our country. Amazingly, 54 of them were upset by the NSA's "metadata" about phone calls and emails from Americans. But it turned out that the Obama-appointed panel of respected experts, with all the permits and clearances to study these claims in the most detailed way, found that none of them were credible.
Be that as it may, while taxpayer dollars float into your pockets, no one considered it a problem that there are no 17 such powerful agencies in our country to decisively prevent about 400 thousand deaths from firearms in the same period of time since September 11; or 17 interconnected safety agencies on our roads, where more than 450,000 Americans have died since 9/11 (it has been estimated that the average American is 1904 times more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack). Instead, almost all of the money and efforts are directed towards preventing a microscopic number of terrorist conspiracies that have taken place on American soil during this period, some of which are invented by decoy FBI agents. With the confidence that Americans need to be protected from terrorist attacks first and with the fear generated in the country by 9/11, you have created an intelligence structure unmatched in size, capability, and complexity anywhere else in the world.
This is an impressive achievement, especially when you consider one of its shortcomings: this structure has terrible indicators for the correctness of actions and their timeliness. Never before have so many people had access to so much information about our world - and never have we been so prepared for the events taking place in this world.
When it comes to proactively responding to world events, those who can actually help the state they theoretically serve (ADS) almost always lag behind - as far as we can judge from the results of their work, which they prefer to hide. They seem to be regularly caught off guard, failing to live up to the hopes placed on them.
Think about it, think about it well. What victories after September 11 (this date can be considered the original sin of intelligence, which was unable to forestall and prevent it) has achieved a system equal to which the world has never seen before? A single event comes to mind: the surveillance of Osama bin Laden and his destruction (Hollywood immediately made a film about this!). In fact, by that time Osama was already a powerless and nominal leading figure, a legend of jihadism and nothing more. And yet, the operation to destroy it was the only obvious triumph in all these years.
As for the rest, judging by the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt, the disaster in Syria, the crisis in Ukraine, American intelligence, as far as we know, was regularly late and regularly mistaken in its assessments, or simply found itself dumbfounded by the course of events. As a result, the Obama administration seems to be in a state of continuous amazement at what is happening in the world. Let's leave aside the intelligence failure following the death of the American ambassador to Benghazi and ask if there is any indication that the ADR warned President Obama about Libya before he decided in 2011 to intervene and topple Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi? We know the following: he was told (as it seems, erroneously) that if Gaddafi's troops reach Benghazi, there will be a bloody massacre on the verge of genocide.
Could a spokesperson from the intelligence community have guessed what any careful analyst with no access to confidential information would predict based on the results of America's military operations in the 21st century in the Middle East: that Libya will be divided in society, Islamic militants are stepping up their activities (like and everywhere in the region) and chaos will begin? Presumably not, although today the catastrophe in Libya and the destabilization of a much larger region of Africa has become evident.
But let's focus on a lesser known case for a moment. I'm talking about events that only recently caught the attention of the Obama administration and plunged it into the abyss of the third Iraqi war, literally causing hysteria in Washington. Since June, the most successful terrorist organization in history has shown itself in all its glory in Syria and Iraq, beginning to actively recruit jihadists throughout the Middle East and Africa and beyond. The Islamic State, which is the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, was born during the American occupation of that country. This organization in the very heart of the Middle East created a mini-state, calling it the caliphate. Part of the territory it captured, of course, is in the same country where the occupying American troops were located for eight years, where the United States was supposed to have countless sources of information, where it had to recruit an army of agents of all stripes. And yet, as each and every one notes, when Islamic State militants suddenly launched an offensive in northern Iraq, the CIA opened its mouth in amazement like a fish washed ashore.
It seems that the ARS failed to anticipate the rapid growth and spread of this group. It knew a thing or two about the weakening of the Iraqi army, but could anyone imagine that this army, which had been created, trained and armed by the Americans, would collapse so quickly? No one could have predicted that its officers would abandon the troops entrusted to them, that the servicemen would take off their uniforms and flee from large cities in northern Iraq, leaving all their American military equipment to militants from the Islamic State.
The intelligence community has not even been able to figure out even the approximate number of these militants. In part because the Islamic State uses messengers, rather than cell phones or e-mail, to transmit messages, the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community knew little about the group or about its leadership did not make serious assessments of its size and objectives, and did not expect it to take over most of Sunni Iraq. It looks very strange. In the end, it turned out that a significant part of the future leadership of the "Islamic State" several years ago were together in the American military prison Camp Bucca.
To understand how unprepared 17 intelligence agencies are, how ineffective the $ 68 billion spent on them can be when our world is turned upside down and ISIS makes itself felt and announces the creation of a caliphate, just listen to the surprised comments of high-ranking officials from the administration …
Poor intelligence as a way of doing things
To some extent, Edward Snowden's startling revelations about the NSA may have distorted our views on American intelligence. However, the question is not just who they eavesdropped on, who they spied on and where they gathered information from. The question should also sound like this: what did they find out? What did they get from the mountains of information, from the billions of bits of intelligence collected every month in individual countries (specifically, 14 billion in Iran, 13.5 billion in Pakistan, 12.7 billion in Jordan, etc.)? What was their "intelligence"? The answer suggests itself: because of the mind-boggling number of organizations engaged in intelligence activities in America, because of the colossal amounts of data they accumulate, the ARS simply drowned in a swamp of information from its excess, and now suffers from collective blindness, not understanding how our world works.
We can say that the American intelligence services strongly support the idea that the world can only be learned through "big data" and a veil of secrecy. There is no doubt that an open and unbiased assessment of our world and its dangers can tell any state much more. In this sense, the system created and improved after 9/11 seems useless, and the funds allocated for it were apparently wasted. And this, in turn, means that we, the uninitiated people, should look with suspicion at the latest horror-stories and exaggerated "predictions" of the ARS about the tiny (and possibly fake) terrorist organization "Khorasan", although this information is regularly filled in our media, painting nightmarish pictures of America's destruction.
If we evaluate the effectiveness of the ARS after September 11 according to the corporate model, then it is easy to imagine that at least 15 departments and divisions from their composition should simply be liquidated, and the remaining two should be reduced (if the Republicans in Congress discovered such disturbances and failures in the work of civilian departments USA, then they would have chased them with a butcher's ax). I have a suspicion that the government can learn much more about our world by donating a modest sum to the work of a small group of smart and discerning observers who only work with open sources of information. For a pittance, these people, no doubt, could provide a much more realistic picture of the functioning of our world and the dangers it poses to Americans. But we will never know. No matter how smart analysts, intelligence agents and agents may exist in the labyrinths of American surveillance and espionage networks, they will probably remain there, and the system will continue to produce huge volumes of low-quality intelligence.
Of course, a maze of 17 overlapping, paramilitary, highly classified agencies that do the same thing, this is a ready-made recipe for fatal madness. Unsurprisingly, over the years, the American intelligence community has become more and more like the US Army, which since September 11 has not won a single war and has not fully completed any of the tasks for which it was intended.
On the other hand, all of the above indicates that the purpose of intelligence is primarily a demonstration of "successful" intelligence activities, thanks to which the White House is one step ahead of the rest of the world. But what if the given system is built on the basis of failures and failures? What if unsuccessful intelligence work is a kind of victory for it?
Perhaps all these overlapping departments can be thought of as a devilishly clever "Rube Goldberg machine" (a device that performs a very simple action in an extremely complex way - approx. Transl.), Acting on the principle that failure is the greatest achievement … After all, in our current system, any intelligence failure is just another indication that we need a more reliable security system, more tracking forces and means, more spies and drones. That is, you only get money to expand further when you fail.
Keep in mind that the 21st century version of intelligence began with a catastrophic failure, because much of the information about the 9/11 hijackers and the fact of the hijacking itself, we either simply ignored, or it was lost in this maze. Of course, this massive failure led to the most colossal, even explosive, intelligence expansion in history (remember, not a single leader was dismissed, demoted, or punished for the events of 9/11, and many of them later received awards and promotions). Whatever mistakes and failures these people make, they achieve impressive successes in terms of their funding, authority, power, secrecy, careers and vitality.
Of course, you can say that it is simply very difficult to get to know and understand our world, and that the future with its surprises is the territory that no country, no army, no network of intelligence agencies can occupy, no matter what funds are spent. for these purposes. Failure to predict the outlines of new lands is a normal condition during travel. But I still have a question: for what purpose are we running 17 intelligence agencies, spending at least $ 68 billion a year on them?
