WASHINGTON: The US intelligence network created after the September 11, 2001 attacks is so unwieldy, even principal actors within it are unable to grasp its size, according to a two-year probe by the Washington Post published Monday.The newspaper's investigation found that nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the bureaucracy has become "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."
Among the findings were some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism-related programs, and 33 building complexes built or under construction to house top-secret work -- the same amount of space as nearly three Pentagons or 22 US Capitol buildings.
The investigation also pointed out the bureaucracy's magnitude results in enormous redundancy and waste, with homeland security and intelligence programs carried out in some 10,000 locations across the country.
Fifty-one federal and military commands located in 15 US cities are now dedicated to tracking the flow of money to and from terrorist networks, and with various agencies producing a whopping 50,000 intelligence reports each year, the volume is so large the Post said "many are routinely ignored."
The September 11 attacks involved a series of coordinated suicide attacks by the extremist Al-Qaeda network upon the United States.
In the wake of the attacks, the US government launched a military invasion of Afghanistan, an Al-Qaeda hub at that time, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bolster its counterterrorism readiness