Pentagon Loses Track of $2 Trillion-plus...

[Dr Dave]

One does not know how to react...

CBS Eye On America

[jesus marion joseph]

Has anyone checked congressman Jefferson's freezer?

[Gary Sisco]

Hey, a trillion here, a trillion there, first thing you know you're talking about real money.

There've been several accounts of guys disappearing from Iraq with huge loot in cash. One was sent with many, many millions of dollars *in cash* (I can't remember the figure) to buy AKs and ammunition on the open market. He was never heard from again, likely one of the largest heists in history.

Another question arises, for me: Why did they send them out to get AKs when the US has more M-16s (and so forth related weapons) warehoused than could possibly used, and a further question, Why is that they think the Iraqis should have a better assault rifle than American grunts?

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

Does this give any of you who want the federal government to raise taxes a little pause? Do you really want Larry, Curly & Moe wasting (and/or losing altogether) even more of your money?

Or do you still have the doe in the headlights look about you?

[GoodSpeak]

OK.

Does this surprise anybody?








Really?

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

This is only in the Pentagon. Imagine all the money unaccounted for elsewhere in the federal government.

Just the tip of the iceberg, and that's the scary part.

[patricia]

From what I've read, millions of dollars in cash was just handed out like kleenex by the U.S. government at least at the beginning of this fiasco, never to be seen again. Why the ordinary public is not more outraged by this and all the outright theft by contractors and others is beyond me.
I guess that people just expect to be fleeced by their government on a regular basis with projects overpriced and their costs just accepted and paid, no questions asked.
Government contract seems to have long been shorthand for contractors being able to charge whatever they like, with little or no oversight. The bid is accepted and cost over-runs are too, even to the point of multiplying the original bid for whatever the work is, many times over.
But, the cost over-runs are even more egregious in this endless war than the usual chicanary expected from government-funded projects.
The last straw I guess.

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

Originally Posted by patricia

Why the ordinary public is not more outraged by this and all the outright theft by contractors and others is beyond me.
I guess that people just expect to be fleeced by their government on a regular basis with projects overpriced and their costs just accepted and paid, no questions asked.

Either that, or most people don't know and/or don't care. I maintain the latter is true.

Maybe if the media were all over this sort of thing, not just occasionally, and not only with the Pentagon, it would resonate with the public a little more. Show us how much money the Department of Education wastes or how much money taken from us in Social Security tax has been wasted on other things or lost altogether and it would start to hit home with the average Joe.

[GoodSpeak]

Sure.

We only hope Fox News will do a scathing expose on this issue.





Yeah...like that'll happen.

[Gary Sisco]

It remains of course to state the obvious: Money is never lost or disappeared. All of it is in someone's pockets, somewhere.

But this is no surprise. The Pentagon has long exemplified corruption on a vast scale unprecedented in human history. It's just hypertrophied under BushCheney, like everything else.

[Gary Sisco]

From Sullivan's site, where there are links:

More Chaotic than Civil War
25 Nov 2006 02:43 pm


That's Washington Post reporter, Anthony Shadid's description of the almost indescribable anarchy and carnage unleashed by the American invasion of Iraq:


"There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy."


For good measure, we now discover that this anarchy has found a way to sustain itself financially for an indefinite period of time:


"A classified United States government report ... obtained by The New York Times, estimates that armed groups responsible for many of the insurgent and terrorist attacks across Iraq are raising between $70 million and $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says that between $25 million and $100 million of the total comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry that is aided by 'corrupt and complicit' Iraqi government officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid to save thousands of kidnapping victims in Iraq, the report said. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by senior American officials in Iraq as including France and Italy — paid Iraqi kidnappers an estimated $30 million in ransom last year."


Remember that only last month vice-president Dick Cheney was opining that the Maliki government was doing "remarkably well." These people cannot even lie competently, can they?

*************

No, they can't, but to be fair it's nearly impossible not to get caught in a lie today, with the internet and email and so forth. One send button ends a lie, bang boom. They've not adjusted to this obvious fact of life, yet.

In Cheney, Bush and other top admin officials' case, however, there is also a clinical aspect to their denial as much as there is lying. Of this, no one will ever dissuade me. This kind of denial of objective reality can't be anything but clinical, whether or not it has a clinical name.

[Dr Dave]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Wozniak

Does this give any of you who want the federal government to raise taxes a little pause? Do you really want Larry, Curly & Moe wasting (and/or losing altogether) even more of your money?

Or do you still have the doe in the headlights look about you?

Actually, Jeffrey, this is what happens when people who think as you do are in charge of government. It goes something like this: "Government can't do anything, so let's just put Larry, Curly & Moe in charge; of course they'll waste money; that's what government does!"

Heck of a job, Brownie.

[patricia]

Most people can't absorb the number of dollars which comprise a billion.
This is what ONE billion dollars looks like:

$1,000,000,000.00

Multiply that by seven and you have JUST the number of dollars which have been stolen by one company during the funding of this war in Iraq.

When their thefts are discovered, there's an OOPS and the theft goes on.
This is money stolen from the American taxpayer and there is a curious disinclination to do anything legally meaningful about it. As long as that is true, the theft will continue.
The only thing that seems to happen is that businesses and individuals figure out a way to get a piece of the pie, not stop the fraud involved.

The general public, as I mentioned earlier, has long been conditioned to accept that the government is going to steal from them and are probably not going to do anything about it this time either.
So..............