MountainMornings

When I was a low level reporter, I covered school board and town hall meetings. I reported about a ban on feeding migratory birds that raised a ruckus because it meant our kids could no longer feed the ducks. I gushed over one too many holiday home and garden tours. Until I reached a point in 2001, when I said, “No more.” We attended the Bride’s college graduation and threw her a celebratory clambake in our backyard that Spring. And that Fall, I stood at our town’s 9/11 memorial service, (we lost 13 and the town across the river lost 37 people) totally numb and in shock, thinking at least I was spared from writing about this because, “There are no words.”

Dana Priest is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post and she was a keynote speaker at our new town’s Miller Center. If you missed the part where I explained the Miller Center, check it out on the blogroll in the right margin. Priest has gone where most men fear to tread, deep into the heart of our military-intelligence complex to try and explain how we currently find ourselves fighting a War on Terror, and just what that means. It is humbling to listen to her speak. Her book is titled, “Top Secret America” and her take away? “We have too much redundancy and waste in our intelligence community.”

This woman did her homework; she started counting the secret government agencies (about 1,300), planes that flew rendition prisoners around the world to secret prisons, private intel companies (about 1,900), and people with top secret clearance in this country. Guess how many? 860,000 people – “…that’s about 2.5 times the size of the District of Columbia itself…The capital of Top Secret America is located around the National Security Agency, which is about 35 miles north of Washington, D.C.” Every year, starting in 2002, top secret agencies would more than double in size and produce 50,000 intelligence reports each year! That number just boggled my mind!
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

Before CIA Director Leon Panetta flew to Afghanistan to meet with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai about the latest atrocity committed over the weekend when an American soldier randomly killed civilians, he was preparing his budget. In an interview with The Post, Panetta said that 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.”

But how can we be prepared for some clerk throwing books into an incinerator? How can we anticipate a soldier running amok? Investigative reporters like Priest are invaluable to a free and open society. She heard that she had, “…no need to know,” about her subjects too many times to count. But she persisted. At such a critical time in history, I’m planning on reading this book. Are you old enough to remember when women could only write housekeeping copy for newspapers?