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Other segments from the episode on September 5, 2011
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The 'Top Secret America' Created After September 11
TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
This week, we'll be doing several programs related to the 10th anniversary of
9/11. In response to the attacks, the government created a top secret world of
agencies and private contractors to collect and analyze intelligence. It's
become so large, unwieldy and 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.
The system put in place to keep the U.S. safe is so massive, its effectiveness
is impossible to determine. These are some of the conclusions Dana Priest and
William Arkin reached in their Washington Post series "Top Secret America."
They've just expanded the series into a book called "Top Secret America: The
Rise of a New American Security State."
Dana Priest is my guest. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her investigation
into the CIA's secret prisons. In 2008, she won another Pulitzer for her
investigation into conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Dana Priest, welcome to FRESH AIR. Would you just describe the scope of this
world that you describe as top secret America?
Ms. DANA PRIEST (Co-author, "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American
Security State"): Well, physically, which is what we could see about this
world, since it is top secret, it is really a large community that's spread out
throughout the Washington area, but also in different parts of the country.
It's so big and includes so many buildings, that it is many, many times the
size of the Pentagon, if you were to put it together.
And inside top secret America, there are about 2,000 companies that work on top
secret projects and programs for government. And there are another 1,200
organizations, give or take, that work on top secret programs in intelligence
and counterterrorism. And that was the world that we sought to describe, the
world that great up in response to 9/11, when the government said: We're facing
an enemy we don't understand. We don't have the tools to deal with it. Here's
billions, literally, $40, then another $40 billion, and a blank check after
that, for anybody with a good idea to go and pursue it.
GROSS: I would want the vastness of these new intelligence and Homeland
Security outfits and the amount of money being given to them to make me feel
secure. But reading your book, a lot of that made me feel insecure, because
you're saying that there's so much redundancy and such a huge volume of
information and reports being generated by all these new agencies and private
contractors, and it's impossible to synthesize it and really keep up with it.
Ms. PRIEST: Well, that's so true. Not only does the government find itself
unable to get its arms around itself, this top secret America behemoth, it
doesn't know what's inside, it doesn't really know what works, what doesn't
work, and nobody still, 10 years later, is really in charge of those questions.
And at the bottom line, nobody still is in charge of counterterrorism.
So what you have are, you know, good-hearted people and companies and employees
that are doing what they think they can get paid for and what they - what might
help. But so much of it is reinventing the wheel that another organization has
already reinvented five times.
That's particularly true within the military, which is the largest government
agency in this world, much larger than the CIA or the National Security Agency.
So you find, within the military, large units that decided on their own that
they wanted to be - get in the fight, so to speak. They wanted to do
counterterrorism, and they were often ill-equipped to do that.
GROSS: How has this happened? How has our need to protect ourselves ended up in
this, like, vast network of agencies and private contractors that aren't
necessarily communicating, that are duplicating each other and that are
publishing all these reports that nobody can read, how did that happen?
Ms. PRIEST: It happened first because everyone was so worried there was going
to be another attack, that Congress and the White House really did say, you
know, anything it takes, here's the money, go do it. And then they didn't
follow up.
And then when they got better at understanding the threat and what it was and
what it wasn't, they never reassessed what was in the process of growing up.
And then you have, you know, the other leg of the stool is Congress. You know,
because this is all classified, you and I can't look at it. We can't debate it
like we could the nuclear Seawolf submarine the Defense Department was going to
build and say: Look, do we really need another one or another dozen? We can't
see that. We can't see anything about this.
So Congress plays this role that's critical and unique. Congress needs to do
that. But the intelligence committees are so understaffed and overwhelmed by
the largeness of the task.
There are literally only one handful of staffers who have any expertise in the
National Reconnaissance Office, which is the office that manages, develops spy
satellites and happens to spend tens of billions of dollars a year to do that -
critical function. Those handful of staffers, half of them are very
inexperienced because there's a relatively high turnover. That's your
oversight.
Then the next leg of the stool is the secrecy. You and I cannot pressure
government to do better. The interest groups that weigh in on every other
subject in our government cannot weigh in in any public manner.
So you get this cabal of people who have clearances, and they weigh in. And
that cabal unfortunately includes a profit motive, because there are so many
companies whose livelihood depends on a continued flow of money to them,
because the government in the beginning did rely on contractors to do so much
of the work, because Congress and the White House didn't want it to appear as
if they were growing government while they were asking government to do much
more in the beginning. So they brought in private contractors.
GROSS: While you were listening to Congress debate the debt ceiling and what
programs we should cut or cut back to help balance the budget, were you
thinking about all the money we're spending on top secret America? For example,
you write that after 9/11, the Bush administration and Congress gave security-
related agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending. And
you say this top secret world has grown so large, no one even knows how much
money it costs.
Ms. PRIEST: Of course I was, and even before the deficit became the center of
such attention. It was something that gnawed at me and actually was one of the
motivations for doing this sort of work, which wasn't easy, was watching social
programs - programs overseas that are meant to deal with terrorism in a
different way, not in a military way - be killed because of funding, or be
underappreciated because they couldn't show results on paper quickly, while
there was so much waste in this area.
And, I mean, I'm quoting a general in there who's also so frustrated. He says:
These buildings are like palaces. And they really are. The director of national
intelligence, which was a position created in 2003 to try to put somebody on
top of all this, to govern it, an experiment which has largely failed, by the
way, that - his office now is 500,000 square feet, the size of five Wal-Mart
stores stacked on top of each other. It's enormous.
GROSS: So this building is - houses the director of national intelligence. I
feel like I am in absolutely no position to judge whether the building needs
that kind of space, and - do you feel like you're in a position to say this is
really too big? I mean...
Ms. PRIEST: I - well, I would say that the people I talk to who have worked
with the director's office say that the size of the office symbolizes top
secret America in that it has become so big that it fails on its weight,
because people within the organization don't know what each other is doing. And
there are so many people, that it's hard to keep adequate oversight over what
they're doing.
But in addition to that, this particular office - which, again, was created
after 9/11 to manage the entire 16 intelligence agencies, according to people
in those agencies, is not a great benefit, has not made operations better, has
not made it more likely that those 16 agencies will find the people they're
looking for and stop the next attack.
GROSS: My guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest,
co-author of the new book "Top Secret America."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: My guest is Dana Priest. She and William Arkin have expanded their
Washington Post series, "Top Secret America," into a new book investigating the
vast and expensive terrorism industrial complex that has been created since
9/11.
Now, getting back to America's deficit and the crisis of spending and cutting
that we're in now, you say, you know, that when the government started
contracting, like, sending a lot of the intelligence and Homeland Security work
to private contractors, the idea was to make it seem to the public that
government was not growing. You write: They wanted the public to believe that
government was not growing during this vast period of expansion of the early
2000s. Contractors would be counted as part of an agency's workforce, and
besides, by turning to the private sector, the government could avoid the rigid
federal civil service rules that made the hiring process slow.
So it looked like government wasn't expanding, but the money that we were
spending paying private contractors was expanding enormously. And in fact, the
private contractors that we've been paying, most of them - or at least many of
them - make more than their counterparts in government, their counterparts in
the CIA or Homeland Security. Why is that?
Ms. PRIEST: Well, the simplest answer is the government will pay it. So the
market will bear it. They are willing to pay these companies this much money to
get the bodies. And because there are a limited number of companies that do the
work that, for instance, the CIA wants done, they're valuable to them.
Now, it's created this unintended adverse consequence, which is it also drew
from the agencies. It sucked away the very experienced people that those
agencies needed to keep. And it did it because it could attract them with such
high salaries and relatively less stressful work than when you're working in
government.
So it also - in addition to costing more - it bled the government of some of
its best people, and then it sold those people back to them for two and three
times as much money. So in recent years, the CIA, for example, tried to do
something about that, because they just saw people flooding out of the agency -
and not just senior people who could also collect their pension and retirement,
but young people who got enough experience to get a clearance - which takes
quite a bit of investigation on the part of the government. They would see them
leave before they really had much of a career, but then again be sold right
back to the same agency for much more money.
So it created this dynamic of brain drain, and the agency put on a prohibition
that anybody who left before 20 years - which is their retirement period -
could not work for the agency for a year.
Well, that sounds onerous, but actually what companies did - because they knew
these employees were so valuable - is they would hire them. They would have
them sit in the office doing basically nothing for a year, paying them these
very high salaries - you and I paying them their high salaries - so that when a
year was up, they could go work at the agency.
So it didn't really affect the larger companies that do this work. And by the
way, some of those large companies like Booz Allen Hamilton now are - they
really are an arm of the intelligence world.
Booz Allen, for example - which has a very good reputation within the community
- its work is almost exclusively government contracting in the intelligence
world now. So it's like a shadow agency, if you will.
GROSS: You know, just in terms of the expansion of this top secret world, there
are so many employees in the infrastructure of clearing people for their top
secret status. I mean, that's an industry in and of itself now.
Ms. PRIEST: It's an industry in and of itself that is contracted out.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. PRIEST: So even - so the government is now paying contractors to do the
security clearances for other contractors.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. PRIEST: I mean, the contractors, in the beginning, were supposed to just be
supplemental to the federal employees. But they - and, in fact, there are
regulations that say they cannot take on what's called inherently governmental
functions, because you don't want somebody to have a money motive, in addition
to a public service motive.
But now they are everywhere, everywhere, and some agencies 0 like the satellite
agency, the NRO - could really not exist, could not do what they need to do
without them. That wall that's so famous, the marble - the white marble wall at
the CIA, where the officers who have died in the line of duty have stars,
anonymous stars, 22 of those stars have been put up there since 9/11 for
officers who have died in the line of duty. Eight of those 22 are actually
contractors who were involved with, for the most part, covert action on the
part of the United States working with the agency. So that gives you some sense
of how ingrained contractors are to the intelligence world today.
GROSS: You know, one of the things I was thinking about reading book, is about
how the Homeland Security and intelligence business has expanded so enormously
at the same time that cities and towns are cutting back police and fire
departments because they don't have the money to support them. So we have this
huge federal infrastructure, but the local infrastructure in so many places is
falling apart. And they're the first responders.
Ms. PRIEST: Right. And so what you have now is you have DHS agreeing to give
states and local authorities - because they are now on this big campaign, I
should say, to get local police to be their front line against terrorism. They
will give local communities money for intelligence fusion cells and for
counterterrorism analysis and work. And those local communities are so
desperate for money that even though they don't really think they have an issue
with terrorism, they take the money, agree to do - agree to use their force to
do some of this work, which some of them don't really think needs to be done,
just so that they can get extra equipment and use it for regular crime-
fighting.
I went to Memphis, Tennessee, and spent a good - a fair amount of time there
with the Memphis Police Department, who's very gung-ho and very inventive in
the sort of information they're collecting on people that they think are
potentially criminals. And a lot of that equipment is given to them or funded
by DHS terrorism money. And, by the way, some of the intelligence equipment is
equipment it developed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that has migrated
back to the law enforcement community here.
And I'm talking about biometric equipment that can take thumbprints at traffic
stops or take a picture of someone's iris, even, from a distance without them
knowing, some of the cameras that are now used to automatically pull up a
license plate information in a car when the police are just driving around, and
a lot of the cameras that are posted in high-crime areas throughout the - in
the case Memphis, but other communities that record people's actions. But there
are many others, as well.
GROSS: What are your concerns about that?
Ms. PRIEST: The concerns are privacy concerns, because it is being melded up
with commercially available information on individuals that, prior to this
separate boom in IT and just technology, the police needed a warrant to
understand, you know, all the places that you lived or what your various phone
numbers were. They needed to get some kind of higher permission to do that.
Well, now they can buy commercially available data about you and me, like you
and I can, or like the Washington Post can when we do that in order to do our
work as reporters. Law enforcement can do that now, also.
So you have this marriage of high-tech technology that can really probe
somebody's background, plus the surveillance equipment and biometric
information. And now they're also creating the DHS and FBI databases in which
people who are suspected of acting suspiciously - which is a pretty low bar. It
doesn't mean - it's nothing close to probable cause that is required to open an
investigation by a police department. It's much less than that.
We have seen dozens of cases throughout the country, the ACLU has collected
them on their website - but we've done some collecting ourselves - in which
local police departments and sheriffs departments, wanting to join the
counterterrorism fight, have totally misunderstood what they should be doing in
that regard and have collected information on anti-war activists and
protestors, on, you know, people who are protesting environmental issues.
They've collected information on Tea Party activists, just the whole gamut of
legal demonstrators and activists on various causes, and they've put it under
the name of counterterrorism.
GROSS: Dana Priest will be back in the second half of the show. Her new book is
called "Top Secret America." Tonight, she reports on top secret America in an
edition of the PBS series "Frontline."
I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Pulitzer prize-winning,
Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Priest and William Arkin have written a
new book called "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security
State." It's about the massive terrorism industrial complex that was created in
response to 9/11 that Priest says operates in the dark without sufficient
oversight.
Your new book expands on the series that you wrote for the Washington Post on
top secret America. But there's a new chapter you write about, about JSOC,
which stands for the Joint Special Operations Command. And you describe this as
sitting at the center of the secret universe as the dark matter that shapes the
world in ways that are usually not detectable. What do you mean?
Ms. PRIEST: Well, JSCO is the secret clandestine military command that actually
does more work on counterterrorism against al-Qaida and its supporters that the
CIA does, and in the last 10 years has managed to pull off a level of obscurity
that the CIA hasn't even managed.
It is used by the president, reports directly to the president and to the
secretary of defense. And really, until now, we have had - for those of us who
were, you know, looking at this - we've had sporadic reporting here and there
about actions that were undertaken by JSOC. But this chapter is trying to put
together its history since 9/11, when it was completely revamped into a man-
hunting, lethal-action arm of the military. And to say - and to look at what
it's allowed to do and how it does it and how effective it has been...
GROSS: Well, it was a JSOC SEAL team that killed bin Laden. So...
Ms. PRIEST: Right.
GROSS: ...and is really effective.
Ms. PRIEST: Yes. I mean, as a killing machine, it is highly effective. It is -
you know, no one competes with them, not - certainly not the CIA's
paramilitary. It is a professionalized killing force, and that's what it's been
used for. And, in fact, president Obama has really increased the use of JSOC.
They operate in very small groups of people so they can keep a low profile.
They also operate unmanned drones that are there for surveillance to collect
information about their targets, but also lethal drone strikes. They have their
own interrogation facilities that they alone control. And they have actually
captured and killed a lot more al-Qaida than the CIA have.
And they've been revamped to by General Stanley McChrystal, who really took
them from being a hostage rescue unit that did - definitely did some major work
right after 9/11, into what I call - what we call the secret army of the United
States, because they're a self-sustaining unit that has everything they could
possibly want, from their own satellites to their own intelligence unit and
their own - some reconnaissance planes and aircraft and that sort of thing.
They do - they also have a kill list. And that I guess is one of the more
controversial elements of both JSOC and the CIA, is that they can put people on
that list - individuals, single individuals on that list, and they can then
hunt them down and kill them. Some people call that assassination, which is
banned in the United States. Other people call that targeted killing. That's
what the U.S. government calls it.
GROSS: You describe JSOC as being the president's personal weapon against
terrorists, and that both President Bush and Obama have used it that way. What
are the implications of that?
Ms. PRIEST: Well, again, because it's all shrouded in secrecy, and in this case
a level of secrecy that is beyond all others. It's hard for the public to know,
not only what they're doing, but whether that - those actions are effective, or
whether they're counterproductive.
In the chapter I quote Stanley McChrystal, General McChrystal, who was the
commander of JSOC and really revamped it in - starting in 2003, is saying some
of our actions were counterproductive. That's because whatever they do, and if
they make mistakes, there is always a cleanup operation afterwards. There is
always people in a village who hate what has been done, and especially if there
is mistakes and civilians are killed. And that has happened repeatedly. The
blowback for such secret operations, first of all, is no longer secret. People
know what people have been killed. And they began to understand that it was the
military or some kind of unit - because they must have worn clothes that were
similar enough - that it caused, some would argue, it caused more grief than a
benefit. And that is one of the downsides to being able to give the authority
to one person or to a small group of people to use such a lethal weapon without
the rest of the world knowing.
In JSOC's case, they have the authority, under the way the government lawyers
interpret what they do, to do more killing in this way than the CIA does
without informing Congress. Under Bush they did not inform Congress, much at
all, about JSOC's actions. President Obama has taken a slightly different tact.
He believes that they should brief Congress, even though he agrees with the
Bush administration's legal interpretation of what they're doing, but that it
makes political sense to brief some of the conventional leaders about what JSOC
is doing.
The CIA has more oversight of its activities than JSOC does. That's the bottom
line. JSOC's oversight comes from its own chain of command. The CIA's oversight
comes, not only from its own chain of command, but also from Congress.
GROSS: After bin Laden was killed, I felt like well, I can understand secrecy
surrounding an operation like that. I mean that's such a...
Ms. PRIEST: Well, absolutely.
GROSS: Yeah.
Ms. PRIEST: Absolutely. We're not arguing that secrecy is unnecessary, not at
all. However, the secrecy has gotten out of control and every body in
government has made that point, going back 20 years. Nine-eleven came along,
and not only were more things put into the ceiver(ph) box but they were more
highly classified, making it more difficult for, not only the public to
understand it, but for other people within government. So it became an
impediment to better government functioning, as well. And now it's simply out
of control. And most people I interviewed would agree with that.
And they would also agree that the government can no longer maintain its
secrets. The WikiLeaks is one product of that, but there are many other
examples of this sort of thinking of classified information that are contained
in the conclusion. But simply stated, the technology that the government uses
in its computer systems is easily penetrated and is being penetrated by people
who have no authorization to get that information. So it realizes that its
ability to control this vast amount of information it's created that's
classified, is very weak at the moment. And many people advocate it - just
start over again, and say what is it that we really need to keep secret?
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Washington Post Pulitzer prize-
winning reporter Dana Priest. Her new book is called "Top Secret America: The
Rise of the New American Security State."
Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.
This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer prize-winning Washington
Post reporter, Dana Priest. We're talking about her new book "Top Secret
America," which is about how top secret private contractors and government
agencies have just expanded incredibly since 9/11.
Let's give some kind of physical reality to the top secret America that you're
describing. There's all kinds of new complexes that have grown up or that are
being built in the wake of 9/11. You say that the capital of this alternative
America is actually the Baltimore area, which surprised me. What's going on in
Baltimore?
Ms. PRIEST: Right. South of Baltimore, near the Baltimore Airport, is Fort
Meade, the home of the National Security Agency, which is an agency that
probably grew the most after 9/11. And it's the worldwide eavesdropping agency.
I backed into this discovery, because I was invited to go to a... You know, one
of the hazards, one of the difficulties of reporting this book, is how do you
get inside? So I was looking for places where I could go and get inside and do
something that was being done that relates the to top secret America, and the
Defense Intelligence Agency let me come into a class in which they were
teaching people how to program these cipher locks. And they were teaching them
how to maintain classified meeting space.
So they let me come in and watch what they were doing. And when I drove over
there, I noticed that the whole area where this classroom was situated, the
office was situated, had this eerie feel to it. I mean, I had to bring my
editor out to show her, to say, am I crazy?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. PRIEST: But the buildings looked different. They were, sort of, paler or
plainer than - lots of them had the same time of tinted glass. They had no
signs that identified what was inside, but only numbers that identify them. And
a lot of long stay hotels, for what I later learned, were contractors that
would come in. Well, this led to a big exploration of this area. Bill Arkin, up
in Vermont, where he did a lot of his work, would explore using his addresses
and his incredible research tools to map the area. And then I would get in the
car and drive around with my computer on the armrest, talking to Bill on the
phone, and the both of us trying to figure out where I should go next to find
these industrial - it looked like a business park, but they are business parks
for these corporations and agencies. And then I found a realtor who understood
the dynamics of the area, and he took me around and showed me even more.
And what it turned out to be was a part of the alternative geography that's
mirrored in other areas of the country, which is you have a large agency like
the NSA, which is the hub, and then around it grows up all the contractors who
need to be near it to do their work, and then also hundreds of other government
agencies that supply bits and pieces and personnel for this and that, that they
also need. And so you get a cluster effect. And that's how we discovered this
cluster and then went about discovering the other clusters. But what we
discovered about this cluster is that when you start counting these things, as
we did, that this is the densest.
GROSS: What's an example of something that you found in one of these secret
communities, these secret hubs, that you found especially interesting?
Ms. PRIEST: Well, the 10 richest counties in the United States, according to
the Census Bureau, seven of them are hubs of top secret America. That tells me
that we are not just talking about a concentration of top secret work in a
concentration of top secret corporate business, but the ripple effect of that
is that the people who live and work in those communities are, by far, more
well off, economically, than their counterparts elsewhere. And so there you see
the distortion, if you will, of top secret America's economic power. The
schools are better. The income is higher. The standard of living is much
different.
GROSS: So I'm wondering, when you hear politicians say government can't create
jobs...
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: ...what does it make you think? Because you've seen all these jobs,
high-paying jobs, that have basically - they're with private contractors, but
they've been created to fulfill government needs. And you've also seen
government agencies, in top secret America, expand.
Ms. PRIEST: Oh, and what I've just said about those wealthy communities is the
best example of that. I mean, this is a jobs program, as well - which is not -
which is a very important political point, because jobs programs are really
hard to cut back on, politically, for government, for politicians, because
people's livelihoods are at stake.
I mean, part of the reason this whole thing exists, is because our political
leaders have not yet had an honest dialogue with the public about terrorism -
about how many al-Qaida - about how much the al-Qaida network has been
decimated, about what its strengths are that remain. It's much easier just to
keep adding more onto this, so that if something were to happen, you know,
nobody can be blamed. The cost, the political cost of cutting this, publicly,
is that if something happens then political leaders are going to accuse whoever
did the cutting of risking our future and risking our safety. So it's just much
easier to maintain this belief that we are nearly under attack every day, than
it is to speak openly and honestly and disclose much more about what we know
about al-Qaidaâs strength right now.
And if you do that - and I have had that conversation with many people, and
there is really - I mean, while there is still great concern about al-Qaida,
al-Qaida is largely a decimated network now and there are several hundreds
left. There are new affiliates that have sprung up that are very worrisome, but
al-Qaida is nothing like it was before. And that's been a success of some of
these organizations like the FBI, like JSOC, like the CIA - not the larger top
secret America that we describe in the book.
GROSS: So thatâs interesting. So you'd think some of the greatest victories in
trying to attack terrorism have come from the already existing part of top
secret America, not from this huge new infrastructure that's grown up?
Ms. PRIEST: You can definitely pick out half a dozen organizations that have
been highly effective in capturing and killing al-Qaida, and in producing the
intelligence, more importantly, that it took to do that and creating the weapon
systems that it also took to do that job. But they are a minority. They are a
corner of this larger top secret America beast that we write about.
GROSS: Top secret America, as you describe it, has grown so much. But the more
people trying to keep it secret, the more likely the secret it is to get out.
So is the secrecy getting harder and harder to preserve as the secret
organizations, and contractors and government agencies expands and expands, and
as the Internet keeps gathering more and more information? I mean you point out
in your book that there are a whole lot of, like, top secret documents, even
before WikiLeaks, that have been on the Internet.
Ms. PRIEST: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This is one of the oddities about this,
is that as secrecy grew and more became classified, the harder it was to keep
that information from leaking out one way or the other. And one of the
revelations in the book is a counterintelligence review of the WikiLeaks leaks.
And government discovered that many of its agencies don't understand how to
keep their networks safe, don't understand where their networks are leaking.
Those that do, haven't patched them up because they either don't have the money
or the personnel that know how to do it. And what's more, is that they believe
this problem is only going to get worse as, as you say, the Internet gets
stronger and people figure out other ways to penetrate the governmentâs
systems.
Part of this is a generational thing. The leaders are older. They don't
understand as much as they need to about how their own IT systems work. And
it's like plugging your finger in the dyke to try to patch it up here and
there. This problem will only get bigger, which is another reason why it is
time to re-look the entire classification system. Classification system was
written 50 years ago when technology was completely different. But yet, things
are classified today, under top secret, which means that exposing them would
cause grave harm to the national security. And when you look at the things that
have been exposed and written about that are top secret, they have not caused
grave harm to the national security. So really, the whole system needs to be
reviewed. It's been reviewed many times. Someone needs to take...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. PRIEST: ...someone needs to act on it for the sake of keeping those things
secret that need to be secret.
GROSS: Dana Priest, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
Ms. PRIEST: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.
GROSS: Dana Priest is the co-author of the new book "Top Secret America: The
Rise of the New American Security State." You can read an excerpt on our
website, freshair.npr.org.
Priest reports on top secret America in tonight's edition of the PBS series
"Frontline."
Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Amy Waldmanâs new novel "The Submission,"
about the controversy over the design of a 9/11 memorial after the jury that
picks the designer finds out he's Muslim.
This is FRESH AIR.
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Could 'Submission' Be America's September 11 Novel?
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TERRY GROSS, host:
Of all the subjects a first-time novelist might attempt, America in the wake of
September 11th would seem like a really unwise choice. It's too ambitious, too
fraught, just too much. Fortunately, says book critic Maureen Corrigan, Amy
Waldman didn't get that memo. Waldman served as co-chief of the South Asia
bureau of The New York Times, and her short fiction has been published in The
Atlantic. Her debut novel about September 11th is called "The Submission," and
Maureen calls it a triumph.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: "The Submission" is a gorgeously written novel of ideas about
America in the wake of September 11th. It tackles subjects like identity
politics, undocumented immigrants and the stress fractures of democracy. Maybe
the most audacious question that's posed by Amy Waldman's debut novel, however,
is the implicit one that lingers long after a reader finishes it: Namely, could
it be that a decade after the attacks, America finally has the 9/11 novel - one
that does justice, artistically and historically, to the aftershocks of that
day?
Of course, there have been other serious fiction contenders that have ruminated
on September 11th: among them, Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland," Deborah
Eisenberg's short story collection, "Twilight of the Superheroes," Don
DeLillo's "Falling Man," and Ken Kalfus' dark tour de force, "A Disorder
Peculiar to the Country." But "The Submission" distinguishes itself by its
panoramic scope and, also, by the ease with which it pulls off the literary
magic trick of being at once, poetic and polemical.
Arguments about America are hashed out relentlessly on the pages of this novel,
and yet, Waldman never stints on character development, plot or the pleasures
of her inventive language. Ever the English teacher, I even found myself making
lists of all the startling verbs and metaphors Waldman comes up with. For
instance, describing a tough woman laughing, meanly, at another's expense
Waldman writes: Her laugh burst forth, breaking up her face like jackhammered
cement. This is an assured, ambitious novel that appeals to both a reader's
senses and intelligence.
The central situation here will sound more contrived in my summary than it is
in Waldman's execution. Here goes: Two years after the attacks, a jury of
artists, academics and one non-credentialed civilian - a 9/11 widow - has been
convened to sift through some 5,000 blind design entries for a memorial at the
site of ground zero. In the opening chapter, a winner is chosen, and then, the
dumbfounded jury learns that their pick is a Muslim-American architect named
Mohammed Khan. The chief champion of Khan's design was the 9/11 widow, Claire
Burwell.
Waldman succinctly characterizes Claire's grief for her late husband this way:
It had been two years. He appeared in her dreams but vanished on waking, and
she spoke of him in qualities - positive, ebullient, smart, principled - that
had no texture. Claire initially loves the design for a rectangular walled
garden as a memorial - especially, the fact that it would be composed of both
life-affirming greenery, as well as steel trees made out of salvaged scraps
from the World Trade Center. But, as soon as Khan's name is leaked to the
public, controversy rages about the identity of the architect and his garden
design. It seems Islamic to some critics. In fact, Lou Sarge, a Rush Limbaugh-
like radio personality, charges that the garden is Mohammed Khan's sly strategy
to construct an Islamic martyr's paradise on ground zero. Claire finds herself
pressured to rethink her support for the garden. At a raucous public hearing in
New York, one bereaved father poignantly states his objections. We, who have
carried the weight of loss, are now being asked to carry the weight of proving
America's tolerance.
Khan himself is an aloof guy who doesn't play well to the media: He's outraged
that, as an American, he should even be called upon to justify his patriotism.
As more and more voices pile into the national debate, the arguments become
more complicated. A scholar opines that the World Trade Center Towers,
themselves, contained Islamic architectural features. another 9/11 widow speaks
out to ask if there will even be a place for her husband's name on whatever
memorial will be built, given that he was one of the many undocumented
immigrants who worked at the Towers, cleaning bathrooms and hallways.
"The Submission" is sure to generate a lot of discussion in book clubs across
the land about the promises of democracy. In so doing, Waldman's novel itself
serves as a powerful memorial to 9/11 and the struggles of America in its
aftermath.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "The Submission" by Amy Waldman. You can read an excerpt on our
website, freshair.npr.org, where you can download Podcasts of our show.
I'm Terry Gross.
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