$8.5 trillion spent by Pentagon with no audit

"Corruptus in Extremis"

So much money & no one is watching

• It does not matter which moronic party controls Congress or the White House.  Both parties have worked together and voted to spend nearly $9 Trillion (with a T) of military spending with not one single audit since 1996.
• After all, an audit and honest accounting of tax dollars might slow down the wholesale theft of cash that weakens our defense efforts.

Pentagon fraud means the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars sent off by Congress since 1996 has not been audited
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1035184/pentagon-fraud-revealed/#V7LMVTs3BsW2mjVv.99

All told, Pentagon fraud means the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars sent off by Congress since 1996 has not been audited, with
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1035184/pentagon-fraud-revealed/#V7LMVTs3BsW2mjVv.99

(Reuters)  -  Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for.

That sum exceeds the value of China's economic output last year.

At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found.
 And plugging isn't confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.

A review of multiple reports from oversight agencies in recent years shows that the Pentagon also has systematically ignored warnings about its accounting practices. "These types of adjustments, made without supporting documentation … can mask much larger problems in the original accounting data," the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a December 2011 report.

Plugs also are symptomatic of one very large problem: the Pentagon's chronic failure to keep track of its money - how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen.

In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn't need and on storing others long out of date.

It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn't known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.


For the full article go to Reuters News.

USS Gerald Ford - $13 Billion in Scrap Metal
Proper audits might stop the flow of cold hard cash into insane boondoggle spending projects.  For example, the price tag for the USS Gerald Ford is now at $13 billion, it is 22% over budget with three more years to go before it is finished.
.
To compare, the navy of India just took delivery of  INS Vikramaditya aircraft carrier for a cost of $2.35 billion.

See our article - USS Gerald Ford - $13 Billion in Scrap Metal

"We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. .
.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. .
.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
.
General Dwight Eisenhower
President of the United States
Republican 

Assange: 'I am a big admirer of Rand Paul'

Those who tell the truth are forced to hide from the U.S. government.  Meanwhile our Lords and
Masters openly rape the Bill of Rights and enrich themselves with corruption.

“The Republican Party in so far as how it has coupled together with the war industry is not a conservative party at all . . . "

Julian Assange

What is the Republican Party?  -  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange brings up a very good point about the nature of the so-called modern "Conservative" movement.  (Something I bring up almost every day.)

Simply, Assange says the "small government" Conservative face of the GOP is a fraud.  I could not agree with him more.  Every time I turn on the TV I see Conservative talking heads, ex-GOP hack appointees and current politicians urging us to bomb the crap out of half the planet. 

War, war and more wars says the GOP while growing an unconstitutional domestic Police State. 

Assange is only mirroring the warnings of GOP President Dwight Eisenhower about the power of the military-industrial complex.


Assange praised United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and his father, Dr. Ron Paul, during an interview Friday in which he said the family has been among the biggest supporters his whistleblowing group has in Congress.

Speaking from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange said during a live-streamed question-and-answer session that he is “a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the US Congress on a number of issues.”

The Paul family, added Assange, have been “the strongest supporters of the fight against the US attack on WikiLeaks and on me,” reports RT News.

“The Republican Party in so far as how it has coupled together with the war industry is not a conservative party at all and the Libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice in the US Congress,” said Assange.

Speaking of the rift between the majority of Republican lawmakers and the libertarians more closely aligned in ethos of the Pauls, Assange said, “It will be the driver that shifts the United States around.”

“It’s not going to come from the Democrats, it’s not going to come from Ralph Nader, it’s not going to come from the co-opted parts of the Republican Party,” Assange said. “The only hope as far as electoral politics… presently, is the libertarian section of the Republican Party.”

Which way for the GOP?
A Julian Assange, in hiding from Comrade Obama's police state, makes a good point about so-called GOP "Conservatism". 
.
Is the GOP the party of endless undeclared wars around the world and a domestic Police State or is it the party of the Constitution and Liberty?

"We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. .
.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. .
.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
.
General Dwight Eisenhower
President of the United States
Republican 

Liberty’s Backlash - Judge Andrew Napolitano

House GOP Leaders

worked with Nancy Pelosi to crush a

revolt to protect the Bill of Rights

By Judge Andrew Napolitano

Justin Amash, the two-term libertarian Republican congressman from Michigan, joined with John Conyers, the 25-term liberal Democratic congressman from the same state, to offer an amendment to legislation funding the National Security Agency (NSA).

If enacted, the Amash-Conyers amendment would have forced the government’s domestic spies when seeking search warrants to capture Americans’ phone calls, texts and emails first to identify their targets and produce evidence of their terror-related activities before a judge may issue a warrant. The support they garnered had a surprising result that stunned the Washington establishment.

The final vote, in which the Amash-Conyers amendment was defeated by 205 to 217, was delayed for a few hours by the House Republican leadership, which opposed the measure. The Republican leadership team, in conjunction with President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, needed more time for arm-twisting so as to avoid a humiliating loss.

But the House rank-and-file did succeed in sending a message to the big-government types in both parties: Nearly half of the House of Representatives has had enough of government spying and then lying about it, and understands that spying on every American simply cannot withstand minimal scrutiny or basic constitutional analysis.

Gen. James Clapper, the current boss of all domestic spies, obviously lied when he testified under oath to a Senate committee recently that the government was not accumulating massive amounts of data about tens or hundreds of millions of Americans. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, materially misled a House committee.


Congress itself has legislatively attempted to amend the Constitution, knowing that the supreme law of the land can only be amended by three-quarters of the states. The Constitution requires probable cause of criminal activity to be presented to a judge as a precondition of the judge issuing a search warrant. It also requires that the warrant particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.

Yet, Congress told the secret FISA court that it can avoid the Constitution and issue a warrant to any spy looking for the phone calls and electronic communications of anyone in America, without probable cause, without naming the persons whose records are sought and without describing the place to be searched.

Secrecy-smitten judges, whose clerks are NSA agents and who are not permitted to keep copies of their own rulings, have gone along with this.

Obama, who did not want a national debate on all this before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on it, has backed off of his earlier claims that the feds are not reading emails or listening to phone calls. He has done this, no doubt, in light of unrefuted statements by Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers to the effect that federal spies can with the press of a computer key read emails and hear phone calls. Only after the Snowden revelations did Obama welcome the “debate” in the House.

That debate, in which more than half of his own party rejected his spying, lasted precisely 24 minutes.

How can a deliberative body of 434 current members debate an issue as monumental as whether the government is bound by the Constitution when it seeks out terrorists in just 24 minutes?

Apparently, the House Republican leadership that established the absurd 24-minute rule feared a serious and meaningful public discussion in which its authoritarian impulses would need to confront the Constitution its members swore to uphold. In that 24-minute time span, millions — millions — of Americans’ phone calls and emails were swept into the NSA’s supercomputers in defiance of the Constitution.

There is a political wildfire burning in the land, and we should all be grateful to Snowden for igniting it. The fire eventually will consume the political derelictions of those who have abandoned their oaths to uphold the Constitution so they can sound tough back home. The Amash-Conyers amendment would have required the feds to tell the court the name of the person whose communications they seek and the evidence they have against that person — just as the Constitution requires. And it would have prohibited the NSA dragnets the Constitution obviously was written to prevent.

Instead we have the almost unimaginable prospect and the nearly unthinkable reality of the feds claiming that they can legally put every person in America under their privacy-invading scrutiny in order to catch a few dozen evil ones — most of whom were entrapped by the FBI in the first place and never posed a serious danger to the public or the nation.

Would we all be safer if the feds could knock down any door they wished and arrest any person they chose? Who would want to live in such a society? What value is the Constitution if those in whose hands we have reposed it for safekeeping are afraid to do so?

I expect that the Amash-Conyers amendment will be back on the floor of the House soon. When it is, who will have the courage to preserve, protect and defend personal liberty in a free society?

Article from The Tenth Amendment Center.

Only 24 Minutes to Debate.
"The House Republican leadership that established the absurd 24-minute rule feared a serious and meaningful public discussion in which its authoritarian impulses would need to confront the Constitution its members swore to uphold."
Judge Andrew Napolitano

Lindsey Graham Wants War With Iran by September

The Mad Man of Washington

War in Iraq. War in Afghanistan.  War in Pakistan.  War in Libya.  War in Yemen.  War in Syria.  And now war in Iran.

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham has vowed to introduce legislation in September or October to authorize a military attack on Iran.

 

“If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb,” Graham told a “cheering” audience at a meeting of the Christians United for Israel organization.

 

“The only way to convince Iran to halt their nuclear program is to make it clear that we will take it out,” he added.

 

Graham made the threat despite the fact that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be replaced by Hasan Rouhani on August 4th, who is seen by many as a more moderate leader.

War, War and More War.

“The U.S. is no position to further extend its presence overseas, especially since Congress approved Obama’s initiative to support Syrian rebels by sending arms, ammunition, and perhaps anti-tank weaponry,” reports PolicyMic.

 

“The U.S. is already indirectly dedicating resources to opposing Iran since they are supporting al-Assad’s forces, along with aid from Hezbollah.

Potentially, if Graham’s initiative passes through Congress, both nations could end up preemptively clashing on Syria’s battleground. This would be a terrible outcome for the U.S., considering the significant amount of manpower and resources already allocated abroad and pressing economic issues at home.”

the U.S. is no position to further extend its presence overseas, especially since Congress approved Obama's initiative to support Syrian rebels by sending arms, ammunition, and perhaps anti-tank weaponry. The U.S. is already indirectly dedicating resources to opposing Iran since they are supporting al-Assad's forces, along with aid from Hezbollah.

Potentially, if Graham's initiative passes through Congress, both nations could end up preemptively clashing on Syria's battleground. This would be a terrible outcome for the U.S., considering the significant amount of manpower and resources already allocated abroad and pressing economic issues at home.

"We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. .
.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. .
.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
.
General Dwight Eisenhower 

Secret Court rubber stamps more spying by Big Brother

Rubber Stamp Injustice

Secret court lets NSA extend its trawl of Verizon

customers' phone records

Police State  -  Our Founding Fathers are turning over in their graves as our neo-Fascist Scum politicians run this nation with secret courts, secret rulings, while pissing on the Bill of Rights and doing unconstitutional spying on all Americans in the phony name of "security".

The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian's disclosure in June of the NSA's indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) reports the UK Guardian.

The announcement flowed, the statement said, from the decision to declassify aspects of the metadata grab "in order to provide the public with a more thorough and balanced understanding of the program".

According to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, the Verizon phone surveillance has been in place – updated every three months – for at least six years, and it is understood to have been applied to other telecoms giants as well.

The decision to go public with the latest FISC court order is an indication of how the Obama administration has opened up the previously hidden world of mass communications surveillance, however slightly, since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed the scheme to the Guardian.

The ODNI statement said "the administration is undertaking a careful and thorough review of whether and to what extent additional information or documents pertaining to this program may be declassified, consistent with the protection of national security."

The Verizon metadata was the first of the major disclosures originating with Snowden, who remains in legal limbo in the international airport in Moscow.

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're

fed, clothed, given medical care and so on.

The only thing lacking... is freedom."
General Dwight Eisenhower