"Our journalism has never been more glorious."-- Jill Abramson, NYT managing editor, January 7, 2009
Just as Abramson was crowing about her paper's continued success, Washington Post investigative reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Dana Priest was hard at work on her next blockbuster. It's out today: "Top Secret America," an exhaustive investigation into an underground and seemingly unmanageable secret network of anti-terrorism efforts across the nation. With William M. Arkin, Priest presents an "alternative geography" of the United States that "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."
It's a must-read. Here it is.
3 comments:
I like the pieces. They say something important about why we've got such a huge budget deficit. But I don't know if they say much that I haven't read in the NYT or books like Bamford's _Puzzle Palace_. They're not reporting much new, just putting it all in a convenient form.
This report hits just the tip of the iceberg, or to be rank-appropriate, the bottom of the barrel. NYT style had a piece on the social impact of subliminal tech and mind control tools a while back that was way ahead in terms of what the possibilities are... But don’t give up and keep digging, if anything, you’ll have your fill of james bond fantasies.
Too bad the press didn't have the hunch to write on our grove born and bred handles with no moral standing making money in mindless mindnumbing ways like robustly endowing random parrots with the God given ability to make fun of women and girls to make them look incompetent and incapable by nature in a variety of ways so society everywhere can rationalize their unequal status... Now incentivizing in-house line-up for engineered reversal and revisal.
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