Caracas Chronicles

If you haven’t yet, you really owe it to yourself to read The Washington Post’s groundbreaking investigative series on the U.S.’s sprawling, comically dysfunctional, creepily hyperempowered National Security bureaucracy. It’s the kind of journalism that we all need more of: smart, important, scrupulously researched and very very readable.

A few things jump out at you reading this stuff:

• The CIA of chavista lore is just one cog in a much, much bigger Intelligence Gathering machine up North. Fat-Man-in-Palace’s fixation with Langley is actually kind of quaint.
• Top Secret America is the bureaucratic aftershock of September 11th. This entire, sprawling apparatus is fixated on islamic radicalism. Other threats barely get a look in. Esteban’s certainty that he’s high on their priority list is just sad: just another narcissistic hissy fit.
• Even then, the security apparatus in D.C. is now so awesomely large, just so sprawling, it’s inconceivable at least one or two of those Special Projects aren’t running out of Cerro Verde.

But, for once, the Venezuela-link isn’t the main point of this post. You should read the series just for the magnificent experience of witnessing top-flight journalists as deliver on the promise of their profession.