HOWEVER, IN NOVEMBER LAST YEAR...
OBAMA BACKS $607 BILLION PENTAGON BILL
"On top of the base budget, the funding bill includes $50.9 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” that will pay for ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, down from $64.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Together with a few smaller increments, this brings the total in military spending to $607 billion for the fiscal year that began October 1.
AT $607 BILLION, THAT'S HALF OF OUR NATIONAL BUDGET!
JUST SO WE ALL KNOW, AMERICA SPENT FROM $296 BILLION TO $341 BILLION IN ALL OF WORLD WAR TWO (depending on the source one uses).
Ten years in Vietnam cost us $111 billion.
[The above link is a PDF that gives stats for all wars since the Revolutionary War.]
POST-9/11 EXPENDITURE, AT LEAST WHAT'S ON THE "OFFICIAL BOOKS", HAD COST US, AS OF JUNE, 2010, $1.147 TRILLION, TRILLION WITH A "T".
BUT WE HAVE TO REMEMBER THAT, THE DAY BEFORE 9/11, RUMSFELD WAS LOOKING FOR OVER $2.3 TRILLION THAT THE PENTAGON HAD SEEMED TO HAVE "MISPLACED".
One day before the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the above admission.
Besides being reported months later in a CBS report, the quote is still posted at http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010910-secdef.html on the Department of Defense website.
And on PBS at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june01/dollars_2-12.html we learn that this figure came from a report of the Pentagon's inspector general.
"Its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends," reports CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales.
CooperativeResearch pointed out that "auditors won’t even quantify how much money is missing from fiscal year 2001, causing “some [to] fear it’s worse” than 2000".
"A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. When military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet 'for pennies on the dollar.'" ~~ San Francisco Chronicle, 5/18/03
"The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the US Department of Defence is unable to account properly for 96% of the money. Out of just over $9bn, $8.7bn is unaccounted for." ~~ BBC News, 7/27/10
"All other federal agencies are audited annually ... and with rare exceptions, they pass every year. The Pentagon alone has never been audited, leaving roughly $8.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars unaccounted for since 1996. The Pentagon has for years kept lousy books with impunity." ~~ MSNBC/Reuters, 12/23/13 (Reuters link)
HOW CAN WE BE SPENDING MORE ON DEFENSE IN THE PAST 16 YEARS THAN IN ALL OUR PREVIOUS WARS ADDED TOGETHER?
WE ARE IN NO DECLARED WAR ANYWHERE ON EARTH, HAVE BEEN ATTACKED BY NO NATION, HAVE MORE NUKES THAN WE COULD EVER LAUNCH IF WE DID SUDDENLY GO TO WAR, BECAUSE NATIONS THAT WOULD RETALIATE AGAINST US COMBINED WITH OUR OWN NUKES, WOULD DESTROY LIFE ON THIS PLANET BY DAY 2 OF A FULL NUCLEAR WAR.
WHERE DO MISSING/UNACCOUNTED FOR BILLIONS GO?
The War On Waste
January 29, 2002, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml
COOKING THE BOOKS
Behind the Pentagon's doctored ledgersNovember 18, 2013, CNBC/Reuters http://www.cnbc.com/id/101206230
"Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts. Woodford and her fellow [accountants] set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's.
And every month ... numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to ... enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's.
Fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure.
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."
Defense Department drops $100M on unused airline tickets
June 9, 2004, USA Today/New York Times/Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2004-06-09-pentagon-flights_x.htm
"The Defense Department spent an estimated $100 million for airline tickets that were not used over a six-year period and failed to seek refunds even though the tickets were reimbursable.
The GAO estimated that between 1997 and 2003, the Defense Department bought at least $100 million in tickets that were not used or used only partially by a passenger who did not complete all legs of a flight.
The waste went undetected because the department relied on individuals to report the unused tickets.
They did not do so.
"The millions of dollars wasted on unused airline tickets provides another example of why DOD financial management is one of our high-risk areas, with DOD highly vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse," the GAO said."
PENTAGON SPENDS MILLIONS ON ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION DRUGS... Report: DoD spends $84M a year on Viagra, similar meds
DID YOU KNOW TAXPAYER MONEY WENT TO THAT CAUSE?
FROM 1996 UNTIL TODAY, NOTHING HAS CHANGED AT THE PENTAGON...THEY STILL CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR TRILLIONS, THEY STILL CAN'T "SHOW US THE MONEY".
AND CONGRESS JUST KEEPS PUMPING THE TRILLIONS, BILLIONS, MILLIONS IN.
"The Pentagon has failed to address financial problems that dwarf those of Enron," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles.
Gregory Kutz, director of GAO's financial management division [said] ...
"I've been to Wal-Mart. They were able to tell me how many tubes of toothpaste were in Fairfax, Va. And DOD can't find its chem-bio suits."
Opposition to defense spending is portrayed as unpatriotic.
Legislators are often more concerned about winning Pentagon pork than controlling defense waste.
[SOURCE: May 18, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL]
Why didn't the above reports become major headline news?
Why isn't anyone seriously investigating these continually unresolved issues and reporting to the public that the most powerful country in the world can't track its own [military] finances?
For an answer to these questions by award-winning journalists, click here.
To read more mainstream media articles on major government corruption, click here.
And for the deeper reasons behind these issues, a top U.S. general's revealing explanation is available here.
___________________________
A POSTSCRIPT AND FURTHER READING:
EACH DAY OF OUR LIVES, WE ALL CHOOSE WHETHER TO LEARN AND GAIN POWER THROUGH KNOWLEDGE, OR WE DECIDE TO NOT KNOW, AND REMAIN IGNORANT OF FACTS THAT CAN HELP US CREATE SOLUTIONS.
WE LEARN, OR WE PERISH.
MORE INFORMATION THAN WE MAY CARE TO FIND IS "OUT THERE", SIMPLY BURIED IN BACK PAGES OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA OR FOUND IN THE GOVERNMENT'S OWN, MOSTLY UNREAD BY AVERAGE CITIZENS, PUBLIC DOCUMENTS.
READING, LOOKING FOR FACTS IS ESSENTIAL TO PROTECTING OUR LIBERTIES, OUR FREEDOM, OUR NATIONAL SECURITY, AND OUR OWN SECURITY.
THE TRUTH MAY BE "SCARY", MAY BE THINGS THAT HURT US TO DISCOVER, BUT WE WERE CHARGED BY THOSE WHO FOUNDED THIS NATION TO MAINTAIN IT, TO KEEP THIS REPUBLIC, TO MAKE IT OUR BUSINESS TO KNOW EVERY INTRICATE DETAIL OF HOW IT'S RUN, BY WHOM, AND WHY.
WE WERE TO BE THE "WATCHERS ON THE WALL".
WE HAVE, FOR THE MOST PART, FAILED TO BE THAT.
WE CAN KEEP FAILING OR WE CAN STEP UP TO THE TASK, NO MATTER HOW UNCOMFORTABLE IT MAKES US.
WE HAVE THIS NATION TO PROTECT.
IT NEEDS OUR PROTECTION AS IT IS UNDER ATTACK FROM WITHIN.
AS THE NATION GOES, SO GO WE ALL.
WE CAN GO DOWN TO DEFEAT LIKE COMPLACENT SHEEP, OR WE CAN FIGHT FOR HER, FOR AMERICA, FOR EACH OTHER.
THE TEA ROOM CHOSE TO FIGHT OVER 50 YEARS AGO.
AS LONG AS I HAVE BREATH, I WILL FIGHT FOR AMERICA.
I LOVE HER.
WHEN YOU LOVE SOMETHING, SOMEONE, YOU DO ALL YOU CAN TO PROTECT.
ALL...SOME GAVE ALL, ALL GAVE SOME ACROSS TIME TO KEEP HER GREAT AND FREE.
IT'S OUR TURN.
~ON 9/11, FEW ARE AWARE THAT one Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack.
Most of those killed in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts.
They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck.
http://www.s-t.com/daily/12-01/12-20-01/a02wn018.htm
http://www.oilempire.us/trillions.html
~Many people don't want to know about the major cover-ups going on in our world. Feeling relatively secure and content in their personal lives, they choose to avoid matters which might disturb their contentment.
Yet as long as we choose complacency over awareness, these major cover-ups will continue.
In fact, they will likely grow in magnitude until people are finally forced to open their eyes and deal with the consequences.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/indexnewsarticles
http://www.wanttoknow.info/050310pentagontrillionslost
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