THE PENTAGON FAILS AUDIT – $21 TRILLION IN TRANSACTIONS COULD NOT BE TRACED, DOCUMENTED, OR EXPLAINED

SOURCE: LIBERTYBLITZKRIEG.COM

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

– From Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket

The following story’s been on my radar for a while, but it wasn’t until I read the fictional-sounding article published in The Nation yesterday that I finally turned my focus on the issue.

To give you a sense of what’s going on when it comes to the unimaginable levels of waste, secrecy and probable fraud occurring at the U.S. Department of Defense, check out the first couple of paragraphs from this must read article:

 On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest single cost center—the Pentagon receives two of every three federal tax dollars collected—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial.” The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock.

If that’s not surreal enough, here’s what The Nation magazine concluded following its own investigation:

“For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity.”

It appears the Pentagon routinely takes money appropriated by Congress for specific purposes, keeps what it doesn’t spend, and then funnels the excess towards all kinds of unaccountable purposes, apparently including secret programs or black budget operations. The amounts left over and spent in opaque ways appear to amount to billions, if not trillions, of dollars over time. This practice is also completely and flagrantly unconstitutional:

The fraud works like this. When the DoD submits its annual budget requests to Congress, it sends along the prior year’s financial reports, which contain fabricated numbers. The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the DoD does not always spend all of the money Congress allocates in a given year. However, instead of returning such unspent funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon sometimes launders and shifts such moneys to other parts of the DoD’s budget.

Veteran Pentagon staffers say that this practice violates Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution.

Not only does this practice take money that could be put to productive use and place it into the pockets of war profiteers, it may also be funding secret wars all over the world.

This Pentagon accounting fraud is déjà vu all over again for Spinney. Back in the 1980s, he and a handful of other reform-minded colleagues exposed how the DoD used a similar accounting trick to inflate Pentagon spending—and to accumulate money for “off-the-books” programs. “DoD routinely over-estimated inflation rates for weapons systems,” Spinney recalled. “When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury, as required by law, but slipped them into something called a ‘Merged Surplus Account,’” he said.

“In that way, the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion” (about $120 billion in today’s money), Spinney added. He believes that similar tricks are being used today to fund secret programs, possibly including US Special Forces activity in Niger. That program appears to have been undertaken without Congress’s knowledge of its true nature, which only came to light when a Special Forces unit was ambushed there last year, resulting in the deaths of four US soldiers.

This immediately made me think of a tweet I sent out last night.

What’s most difficult to wrap your head around is the enormity of the unaccountable numbers at play here. Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, and two graduate students looked into decades of Pentagon financial statements and found the following:

In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion. And that $21 trillion includes only plugs that were disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending.

There’s a lot more in this excellent Nation article, which I strongly encourage you to read and share at: Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.

Finally, here’s a clip of David Degraw discussing the issue on Lee Camp’s show earlier this year.

Views: 387

Comment

You need to be a member of 12160 Social Network to add comments!

Join 12160 Social Network

Comment by Less Prone on December 1, 2018 at 11:20am

That's about 6,7 million 20 feet sea containers tightly packed with  U.S.100 dollar bundles. To get a better idea about this, think first how much is a hundred thousand.

How tall is $100,000 dollars in 100 dollar bills?

Comment by Bruce Ross on November 30, 2018 at 12:31am

mmh,  let's see, $21 trillion Divided by 330 million  americans ..... $63,700.00 each give or take ,that's not to bad , pay your share now and help make america great again.

Comment by Burbia on November 29, 2018 at 8:53pm

Deep state pay outs...

Comment by Parrhesia on November 29, 2018 at 7:43pm

Rumsfeld said $2.3 Trillion missing or unaccounted for on 9/10/2001, now it's up to $21 Trillion.  (I'm assuming they never found the $2.3 Trillion.)  Goes to show you if you "misplace" a couple trillion here, a couple trillion there - pretty soon you're talking real money. 

"Destroying the New World Order"

TOP CONTENT THIS WEEK

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE SITE!

mobile page

12160.info/m

12160 Administrators

 

Latest Activity

Doc Vega commented on Doc Vega's blog post Americans You’re Being Squeezed Out!
"Cheeki kea always nice to her you chime in and you're damn right! "
11 hours ago
Doc Vega commented on Doc Vega's blog post Americans You’re Being Squeezed Out!
"Les Prone thanks for your support Dude! "
11 hours ago
Doc Vega posted blog posts
12 hours ago
Doc Vega posted a photo

The inconvenient truth

Trump spells it out!
15 hours ago
Sandy posted a photo
yesterday
Less Prone favorited Doc Vega's blog post What Made the Founding Fathers of America so Brilliant?
yesterday
Less Prone commented on Doc Vega's blog post Why didn't the Archeological World Announce Proof that Jesus Lived?
"Motives of Joe, to shit in the well by showing totally irrelevant proof?"
yesterday
Doc Vega commented on Doc Vega's blog post Why didn't the Archeological World Announce Proof that Jesus Lived?
"Less, Motives of Wyatt or Joe? What archeologist wouldn't want proof of Jesus as part of his…"
yesterday
Doc Vega commented on Doc Vega's blog post Why didn't the Archeological World Announce Proof that Jesus Lived?
"Less Prone, Considering Joe Rogan to be the gatekeeper of anything is just short of ridiculous the…"
yesterday
MAC posted a video

Don't Go To Hong Kong Now (Even on Connecting Flights)

Secure your privacy with Surfshark! Enter coupon code laowhy86 for an extra 3 months free at https://Surfshark.deals/laowhy86Article 23 in Hong Kong is real,...
yesterday
cheeki kea commented on cheeki kea's video
Thumbnail

Terrorist Attack on Moscow - Ukraine Committing Suicide? | Larry C. Johnson

"...And I guess I'll just park this you tube here also for something to ponder from last year.…"
yesterday
tjdavis posted photos
yesterday
Less Prone posted a video

Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) NL

Deze nieuwe documentaire van de Britse filmmaker Martin Durkin toont aan dat klimaatalarm een verzonnen doembeeld is zonder enige wetenschappelijke basis. He...
Monday
Less Prone commented on Doc Vega's blog post Why didn't the Archeological World Announce Proof that Jesus Lived?
"It can be true, but why isn't he offering real evidence? What are his motives?"
Monday
Less Prone favorited Doc Vega's blog post Americans You’re Being Squeezed Out!
Monday
cheeki kea favorited Less Prone's blog post Going against the stream of lies and death
Monday
cheeki kea commented on Doc Vega's blog post Americans You’re Being Squeezed Out!
"You're spot on in regards to the the real estate component of this mass migrant mess Doc V and…"
Monday
cheeki kea commented on cheeki kea's video
Thumbnail

Terrorist Attack on Moscow - Ukraine Committing Suicide? | Larry C. Johnson

"This video out 2 days ago but the 4 terrorists already caught and 11 others involved identified…"
Monday
cheeki kea posted a video

Terrorist Attack on Moscow - Ukraine Committing Suicide? | Larry C. Johnson

Larry C. Johnson is a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. He is the founder and managing partner of BERG Associates, w...
Monday
Less Prone commented on Doc Vega's blog post Why didn't the Archeological World Announce Proof that Jesus Lived?
"You have a link to a physical evidence concerning the existence of Jesus, see your mail about…"
Monday

© 2024   Created by truth.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service

content and site copyright 12160.info 2007-2019 - all rights reserved. unless otherwise noted