The Fraud and Cover-Up of the Untraceable $21 Trillion 'Missing' from the Pentagon

Just before 9/11 happened, $2.3 trillion was reported missing on September 10, 2001. Then the Pentagon was surprisingly hit right in the area where the accounting office was on September 11. What a coincidence. Those box-cutter hijacking terrorists (so the official narrative goes) knew how to cover-up the Pentagon's fraud.

_{David B. Gleason/flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0}

Since then, the Pentagon has been shadily spending trillions. Going back 20 years to 1998, the misallocated untraceable "missing" Pentagon spending amounts to a whopping $21 trillion! And that's only the amount "disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending", reports The Nation in a recent article. It's only the amount known from the cooked-up books they have officially written down!

These are almost unimaginable levels of waste and fraud being carried out through secrecy. As I posted about last week, the Pentagon failed it's first ever audit. Yes, that's right, it's first-ever-audit. They failed to audit themselves for decades, so Congress finally go off it's ass and hired a firm to do it. But they couldn't even finish the audit, as The Nation says in the opening of it's 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 discretionary cost center—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself.

Wow. Take that in. Of all the money the U.S. federal governments spends, the Department of WAR gets 54% of it all. And it is the Department of War. That's what the Department of Defense was originally called until the name was changed after WWII. The Secretary of Defense used to also be called Secretary of War

The Nation continues, int eh first paragraph still:

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.

Huge fraud. Monumental cooking of the books. But hey, nothing to see here, as the Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan causally said:

"We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it."

He was also bery proud that an audit even took place, adding:

"It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion dollar organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial."

But as The Nation mentions in the second paragraph of the article: "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."

Really, if this was any other corporation that was "too big to fail", the whole U.S. economy would have crashed, sending ripples out into the rest of the global economic web. The Nation concluded that this crooked book cooking is a huge fraud:

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.

The Pentagon just takes money from other places the federal money could be better be allocated, like "health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more", and instead spends it where they want, not accounting for it, likely in black budget and other secret programs. This unaccounted for money is int he trillions, and so too is the official visible spending. The Nation explains how the Pentagon gets away with it each year through the flagrant fraud of cooking the numbers:

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.

And this has been going on since the 1980s, at the very least, if not from the 1950 or earlier when it was the Department of War. The Nation continues to explain:

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.

The amount of siphoned slush funds could have been involved in countless conflicts and wars since and prior to WWII. We already know through investigative journalism that the U.S. has been funding and arming terrorists int eh Middle East with one hand, while they engage in a war on terrorists with the other, as David DeGraw has shown and talks about in a recent interview with Lee Camp:

Truth About $21 Trillion Missing At The Pentagón w/ David Degraw

As Major General Smedley Butler aptly described, war is a racket in his book by the same name:

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.

As DeGraw says, the U.S. mainstream press is now a psychological operation, with owners invested int eh war racket and profiteering. The U.S. has long been defrauding the American people, and then wave the wand of National Security and redact the information when they get caught. The debt keeps mounting.

The U.S. GDP is the worlds largest at $18.8 trillion. The $21 trillion is 5x more than the entire yearly spending of the U.S. government. To pay that back would take decades. And then the interest is a killer. There is no easy way to pay the debt that will keep mounting. Especially when the Pentagon keeps spending more each year, with nothing and no one stopping them from continuing this fraud on the American people, and destruction of other nations.

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References:

• Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
• The Pentagon Fails Audit – $21 Trillion in Transactions Could Not Be Traced, Documented, or Explained
• Pentagon's 'Lost' Trillions Pocketed by Military-Industrial Complex

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Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.

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