"* 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."
In other words, President Bush launched a crash program to create a massive infrastructure dedicated to fighting the so-called Long War against Islamic militancy. But the size of the endeavor was so vast and its construction so hasty and haphazard that it may not actually be adding to the national security.
But what this Top-Secret America is sure to do is to fight aggressively to maintain its jobs, money and power. In that, it will be aided by its key allies in the complementary institutions of the old "military-industrial complex," the neocon "democracy" infrastructure, and the right-wing media. Other potent groups, such as the Republican Party and the Israel Lobby, will help, too.
Political/Media Asymmetry
The combination of these factors especially when weighed against the relatively weak and severely underfunded counter-forces of America's progressives and independent media suggests that a meaningful democracy may no longer exist in the United States.
Many on the Left have fumed about President Barack Obama's failure to reverse Bush's national security policies. However, if one examines the relative power factors, it would probably amount to political suicide for Obama or any national leader to try to dismantle these interlocking infrastructures.
While the Right has worked diligently over the past several decades to strengthen its institutions and influence, the American Left has marginalized itself, choosing to possess no media outlets or think tanks that even come close to rivaling what the Right has in multiplicity.
For instance, wealthy progressives allowed the liberal talk-radio network Air America a modest effort to balance the Right's enormous advantage in talk radio to collapse this year. Meanwhile, worthy Internet sites go begging, while the right-wingers keep adding and adding to their media assets.
(Further revealing the asymmetry of today's American media, right-wing Newsmax, run by conspiracy theorist Christopher Ruddy, has put in a bid to buy the Washington Post Co.'s financially troubled Newsweek. Though best known as an Internet site, Newsmax already publishes a national magazine.)
Besides the Left's benign neglect toward institutions needed to fight a "war of ideas" with the Right, there is also the cumulative impact of the ever-expanding military-intelligence-neocon arsenals that can level almost any political adversary who poses a significant threat. "Themes" knocking down a political enemy can be put into play instantaneously and will quickly reverberate through the Right's media echo chamber into the mainstream press.
Allied corporate interests also can now fund attack ads almost without restrictions, thanks to a ruling by the right-wing-dominated U.S. Supreme Court last January. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Democracy's End of the Road."]
On an individual level, fewer and fewer professionals in Washington will dare take on this fearsome complex of interlocking infrastructures, what might be called a new Iron Triangle comprised of wealthy military/intelligence contractors, neocon ideologues and right-wing media outlets.
Official Washington both in media and politics will become even more deaf to the needs of average Americans. After all, a corollary to Eisenhower's "military-industrial-complex" warning could be Upton Sinclair's old truism that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
With so much money on one side and so little on the other, few professionals would be willing to put principles over their pocketbooks.
As noble as it might be to fight the good fight without resources, in the real world, that is simply a recipe for failure especially when the other side has a war chest in the billions of dollars and growing by the day.
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