The geography of top secret America

I would love it if the Association of American Geographers invited the Washington Post journalists, Dana Priest and Williiam Arkin, to be speakers at a plenary session at the next Annual Meeting in Seattle.  It will be fantastic to listen to them talk about their two-year investigation into the geography of the ultra secretive American government since 9/11.  The map and the geographic database they have assembled is bloody frightening--that in a democratic society we could have such a system!

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, 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.

The Matrix seems more and more real, and less and less fictional :(

ht