The Washington Post recently had an excellent expose titled Top Secret America, on the intelligence community that has sprung up in the post-9/11 environment. And their findings are pretty shocking, both for the scope of the growth in far-flung intelligence agencies but also for the lack of cohesion and communication between the networks that is still preventing the sharing of useful intelligence, which of course was an original cause of 9/11. Here are just a few of the things that the review uncovered:

* 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.

Read the whole thing.