Sometimes ya gotta laugh

— It isn’t often that I have a good belly laugh, but one burst forth before I could stop it this past Saturday.

It came upon me when I read the opening paragraph of a story with the double-take headline, “Bank-pay czar says shame ample penalty,” to wit: “The Obama administration’s pay czar said Friday that he did not try to recoup $1.6 billion in lavish compensation to top executives at bailed-out banks because he thought shaming the banks was punishment enough.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but who is this jerk?

OK, so that’s pretty strong language. In fact, Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master for compensation, can’t do much more under the law than try to persuade the likes of AIG, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup and others to repay the recklessly extravagant bonuses they heaped upon executives in late 2008.

However, to suggest that the shameless can be shamed by a little public tsk-tsking insults our collective intelligence.

These conglomerates were raking in taxpayer dollars with one paw and shoveling it out to corporate fat cats with the other.

Sometimes ya gotta laugh to keep from crying.

More numbers

Speaking of numbers, so far it has proved impossible for anyone to determine how many vehicles the state owns, let alone whether they’re being used properly. The best count our man Bill Simmons could come up with was somewhere upward of 8,650. Until we know the exact number, we cannot know who is operating those vehicles and whether laws and regulations governing such use are being followed.

But I can go this one better. According to a recent series of investigative stories in The Washington Post that took a team of reporters headed by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin two years to research, “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, 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.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quoted as saying he had tried to get a head count of the number of private contractors employed by the Pentagon and had failed.

As James R. Clapper Jr., President Obama’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence, told the Post, the United States is running so manysecret programs that “there’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all [top-secret programs]. That’s God.”

The reporters did manage to glean a few interesting numbers. To quote from their summary: Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

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.

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those 1.7 billion intercepts into 70 separate databases.

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 fromterrorist 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 largethat many are routinely ignored.

Sorta makes our state-vehicle conundrum seem minuscule by comparison, doesn’t it?

You can read the three stories in the series (as well as peruse support information and sample citizen and official reaction to the series) at topsecretamerica.com.

Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.

Editorial, Pages 19 on 07/28/2010

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