1) Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced
by Lee Camp, April 17, 2019
Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced
I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to be a whistleblower. I’d like to think I would. We all like to think we would, just like we all like to think we could catch the game-winning touchdown, triumph on “America’s Got Talent,” and fold a fitted sheet quickly and without cursing.
But to blow the whistle on a huge organization with a lot of power, likely drawing that power to come crashing down on your head—that takes some serious spine-age. Now, imagine the organization you’re calling out is arguably the largest, most powerful, most secretive and most violent organization on planet Earth. I’m speaking, of course, of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Yet thousands, even tens of thousands, of people have taken that step over the past five years. (More on this in a moment.)
All the while our organized human murder machine continues its work around the world. Every day. Every hour. Never a moment of rest. Never pausing to clip their toenails or scratch their ass. Bombs dropped. Buildings blown up. People killed or imprisoned. No end in sight.
By the way, that’s the term I like to use instead of “military”—Organized Human Murder Machine.
It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? “Mili-tary” sounds too boring, too banal. Sounds like a super-lame couple you met at a party. “Yeah, Millie and Terry over there are accountants. If I have to hear one more joke about capital gains taxes, I’m gonna kill myself.”
But that’s not what the military is. The military is a gigantic organized human murder machine, and even if you “support” every action our military has ever taken, you can still acknowledge it’s an organized human murder machine. (You would just bizarrely argue that all the murder has been just and sound and pure.)
Eleven months ago I covered $21 trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments at the Pentagon over the past 20 years. Don’t try to think about the number $21 trillion because you’ll pass out and hit your head on the desk. If your salary is $40,000 a year, in order to earn $21 trillion, it would take you 525 million years. (At which point you can’t even enjoy the new jet ski you just bought with all your money because you’re almost certainly a brain in a jar … though a nice embroidered jar that only the rich brains can afford.)
Over the past year there has been a little more coverage of the utterly preposterous amount of money unaccounted for at our human murder machine. The Nation magazine, Forbes and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all covered it. Then the white blood cells of the military-industrial complex kicked into action in order to destroy the “infection.” The New York Times and Vox both claimed the $21 trillion is merely the result of large-scale misdocumentation and therefore doesn’t matter at all. Of course, the idea that tens of TRILLIONS of dollars of unaccountable adjustments don’t matter and couldn’t mask any fraud, abuse or corruption is an assertion that makes Charlie Sheen’s statement that he runs on tiger blood seem downright levelheaded.
Probably the best article to date on the $21 trillion was written a few weeks ago by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone.
Point is, even though most of the mainstream media won’t get near this subject (or worse yet—actively attack those who do), the word is getting out: There is a giant sucking sound in the center of the Pentagon, and whatever’s down there feeds on trillions of secretive dollars, then shits out incalculable death and destruction. (It’s the Death Star if officials at the Death Star spent $10,000 on a toilet seat.)
A month ago the Government Accountability Office came out with a report showing the total number of whistleblower complaints over the past five years at the Department of Defense. It’s nearly 100,000. Here’s the only part of the report that references that number:
The Department of Defense Inspector General identified 8 substantiated violations of whistleblower confidentiality between fiscal years 2013 and 2018, representing approximately .01 percent of the 95,613 contacts handled by the Inspector General during that time….
95,613 whistleblower complaints over five years.
Sadly, the Government Accountability Office was trying to brag in that sentence. They were proudly stating, “We only breached the confidentiality of .01 percent of our 95,000 whistleblower complaints. Aren’t we heroes?!”
It’s kind of like saying, “Of the 10,000 dolphins I’ve killed, not a single one has accidentally been a human.” The sane response is, “Well, I’m glad to hear that, but did you say you killed 10,000 dolphins?”
To try to get the 95,000 number to make a little more sense, that averages out to a whistleblower every six minutes of every weekday for five straight years. (That waiting room must be truly nuts. I bet all the good magazines were claimed years ago.)
But maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Perhaps the number 95,613 shouldn’t be all that shocking, and I need to roll my tongue back up and store it back within my mouth. When you have $21 trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments, it means a seizure-inducing amount of money, parts, pieces, bombs, missiles, manpower and devices are flying around with no accountability—likely creating loads of fraud, which would probably create loads of whistleblowers. Hence, maybe we all should have expected this number of whistleblowers rather than being shocked.
For example, there’s the time in 2003 when the U.S. flew $12 billion in cash to Iraq and promptly lost track of it. As the Guardian makes clear in this article, this was not an instance of hackers on a computer system stealing a bunch of ones and zeroes. This was giant pallets of cash money vanishing without a trace. In fact, it was 281 million $100 bills, weighing in at 363 tons. That’s not really the type of thing you can just smuggle away in your sweatshirt while humming “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain.”
Or here’s another example journalist David DeGraw highlights from the Government Accountability Report:
… according to a Department of Defense official, during an initial audit, the Army found 39 Blackhawk helicopters that had not been recorded in the property system. [$819 million in value] Similarly, the Air Force identified 478 buildings and structures at 12 installations that were not in the real property systems. …
The Army lost and then found 39 helicopters.
The Air Force lost and then found 478 buildings.
How does one lose a goddamn building? Unless you just had a bad breakup with David Copperfield, there’s no explanation for losing a building. (Side note: It must suck divorcing David Copperfield. “Really, honey? You think you’re gonna take the house?? PAFOOMPF! What house?!”)
Ya see, this madness stems from the fact that the Pentagon has a standard operating procedure of simply making up numbers to fill their books—which for normal human beings is termed “fraud.” But in the case of the Pentagon, it’s termed, “We get to make shit up because … ummm… national security.”
Here’s more from a 2013 Reuters article:
“Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the Department of Defense’s accounts. … but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions”—in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.”
Have no fear, patriotic Americans, this is not “lying to the American people, stealing their money, and using it for war,” this is just “unsubstantiated change actions.” Try that on your next tax return. Put in $10,000 marked “Unsubstantiated change actions.” I’m sure they’ll love that.
So let’s sum this up, shall we? The Pentagon sucks up 55% of all the discretionary tax money we pay to our government (thanks to our bought-off Congress who receive more Christmas cards from weapons contractors than they do from relatives). Those who work at the Pentagon have no idea where or how the money is spent. They make up many of the numbers resulting in tens of trillions of dollars of unaccounted-for adjustments. They lose helicopters, buildings and, in a few instances, even nuclear warheads. There is an unimaginable amount of fraud and corruption at every level and literally thousands of whistleblowers have tried to come forward every single year—one every six minutes. When they do take that incredibly brave action, over 90% of the claims are dismissed without even being investigated.
You would think, in this topsy-turvy world, if there were one organization we could trust with a trillion dollars a year of our taxpayer money, it would be the Department of Unauthorized Highly Secretive Mass Human Murder.
2) Whistleblowers Shine Light On The Fraud & Corruption Taking Place Within The Pentagon
By Farron Cousins – May 2, 2019
Via America’s Lawyer: Trial Magazine’s Editor Farron Cousins and Lee Camp, Host of Redacted Tonight discuss the reasons behind why Pentagon has silenced nearly 100,000 whistleblowers who have brought complaints in just the last 5 years. Farron Cousins fills in for Mike Papantonio on this episode of America’s Lawyer.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Farron Cousins: Not too long ago, we found out that the Pentagon is apparently really bad at both accounting and accountability when it was revealed that they couldn’t account for $21 trillion in just the last few years. Now that story likely ties into the new reports that nearly 100,000 whistleblowers from the military have come forward in the last five years only to find out that the Department of Defense didn’t care what they had to say. Joining me now to explain what’s happening is RT America’s own, Lee Camp, the host of Redacted Tonight.
Lee Camp: How you doing?
Farron Cousins: So Lee, before we even get into this issue with the whistleblowers, I, I’m great, but listen, we actually have to go back a little bit further for a moment cause I know this is a story you talked about, the $21 trillion missing from the Pentagon. Tell us that story before we get into these, this whistleblower issue here.
Lee Camp: Right. So basically a, a few years ago, an economist named Arthur Skidmore came forward and said that within the publicly available government accountability reports, you could look at how many unaccounted for adjustments there were in the Pentagon’s number crunching in their, in their accounting of their finances. And there were $21 trillion of unaccounted for adjustments, basically adjustments where they say, you know, we don’t know where that money went or what, what happened with it. And he came forward and many people have tried to poke holes at it and say, oh no, well that’s not, and no one seems to actually be able to account for this, the, the, this money where it’s come and gone from. And, you know, I covered it, but not many people were talking about.
A journalist named David DeGraw shined some light on it, but now it has had articles in the Nation did an extensive thing. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted on it. So it is starting to get some play, which means now the mainstream media and corporate media has to try and jump on it and say, nevermind that, ignore that, ignore what your eyes have shown you. And so the New York Times has attacked her, and Vox has attacked her and Cortez for, Ocasio Cortez, for saying the, for having, how dare you call attention to the $21 trillion. No one can even process that amount of money. You know, if you made $40,000 a year, it would take you over 500 million years to make $21 trillion.
Farron Cousins: And that’s, that’s what they, they’ve lost. And you’ve had a lot of people too that have just come out and said, no, no, no, the money wasn’t lost. It just, it wasn’t spent on the thing they said it was. Maybe there’s some accounting error, you know, go back to the George W. Bush era of fuzzy math. You know, that, those are some of the ridiculous excuses they’ve used to try to cover up the fact that $21 trillion is just suddenly gone. So now, okay, we’ve got almost 100,000 whistleblower complaints in the last five years, which is an obviously insane amount of complaints. So how many of these had been investigated, or do we even know how many have been, if any at all?
Lee Camp: Yeah, this is coming from another government accountability office report. This is the DOD Inspector General that researches these things and hidden within the report, they happen to mention that of the 95,613, I believe is the number of whistleblower complaints over the past five years. They, they, they, you know, they, they’ve investigated about 90 or not investigated, sorry, not even looked into 91% over 91% of them. So almost the entirety of these 95,000 whistleblower complaints over just five years have, have even been looked into. I mean, forget whether they were substantiated or not. They’re not even looked at.
So, you know, and it kinda makes sense like when you were, when there’s this much money and manpower and, and weapons of death that are exchanging hands, flying around the world, $21 trillion going unaccounted for adjustments, you’d expect there’d be some people that are like, hey, it seems like something’s going wrong here. Why is this happening? Why is that happening? And sure enough, there are, we just don’t hear about it except hidden within the fine print of the government accountability report that came out a few weeks ago. I mean, if you were to average this out, this would be a whistleblower coming forward every six minutes of every business day for 24 hours a day, for the past five years.
Farron Cousins: Well, what’s really interesting to me too is that we’re, we’re not talking about an underfunded, you know, we’ve slashed all the staff in this particular branch, I guess you’d call it basically a branch of the government. We’re talking about the most heavily funded to the tune of more than $700 billion per year. And when you have, you know, as you pointed out, every six minutes, essentially for the workday, somebody coming in and saying, we, you won’t believe what I found over here. And they’re just saying, no, no, we’re good. Don’t, don’t worry about that. Don’t, don’t talk about it.
We’ve got $700 billion plus in fund money to play with and we don’t need anybody raising any red flags about what we’re actually doing with it. I mean, I think a lot of this would likely stem from either misuse of funds, you know, getting overcharged. Contractors selling us something that’s not quite right. It’s stuff we see all the time with the military, isn’t it?
Lee Camp: Yeah, absolutely. And you can point to specific instances that certainly don’t add up to the entirety that’s unaccounted for, but specific instances that show kind of what’s going on and why there could be this amount of fraud and corruption. For example, in the, the, the Guardian covered the, the fact that in 2003, we shipped pallets of cash to the tune of I think $13 billion. These are not ones and zeros on a computer screen, pallets of cash printed cash sent, over 300 tons of cash was shipped to Iraq to help create the new government we’re creating there and it went missing. So billions of dollars of just even like blocks of cash, shrink-wrapped goes missing in Iraq. And of course that you’d think some people that are probably like, hey, I saw guys walking off with like bundles of cash.
You’d think that would create some whistleblowers, but you can pull it to actual incidents where you’re like, well, if this is going on, clearly there is going to be, I mean, there’s an incredible level of fraud, corruption and the like. And you know, finally the Pentagon was audited this past year, 2018 they, they, after saying they couldn’t be audited, they were legally obligated for years and they never did. They always said, oh, we’ll have it soon. We’ll have it soon. They were finally audited and they came forward and they said, we have failed our audit. They literally just said, oh, we failed it and, and auditor’s millions of dollars and I think a thousand auditors or something we’re involved in this and they couldn’t figure out where the money’s going in the Pentagon.
Farron Cousins: You know, we, we can’t find this money. As you pointed out, 2003 we’re sending pallets of cash over to Iraq. Oops, we lost that. And we can’t get anything better than a couple of paper towels thrown at hurricane victims down in Puerto Rico. I mean this is absolutely disgusting. But to me, another thing about this whistleblower story though that really stands out is obviously recently with Julian Assange. You had everybody wanting to come out and give their opinion of Assange personally, but not necessarily talking about why the attack on Wikileaks matters, what it’s going to do for journalism.
And so this story here where we have 95,000 plus whistleblowers, who most of them get silenced, doesn’t that really show us why groups like Wikileaks are important? Cause that’s one of the few groups out there that was telling us how horrible the Pentagon is, how bad the Department of Defense is. And now we’re just letting these attacks happen on them like nothing matters anymore?
Lee Camp: Yeah, absolutely. They are one of the few organizations that have shown us the incredible corruption and the war crimes and the death and destruction that has wrought by are completely unaccountable monstrosity of a military industrial complex. I mean they showed us the collateral murder damages, damage where a video where, where, the there, there the helicopter pilots are just murdering Iraqi civilians and laughing about it. I mean that’s what goes on. And without Wikileaks you wouldn’t know about so much of this stuff. Of course, that is one small example. They showed us that the, the Afghan diaries, the, the Iraq war logs, the just endless examples of corruption and fraud and, and war crimes.
And it honestly, none of it would have been revealed without Wikileaks, which is why our, you know, ruling elite or powers that be or whatever knew they needed to shut up Julian Assange and they needed to really do what they could to crush Wikileaks. Because for the first time in years, our military, our military industrial complex was accountable to something. The American people were seeing what happens within our giant economy of death because this is a lot of people making a lot of money off of death and destruction and overturning of governments and collapsing countries. And it is, it’s an economy of death and we need to switch to an economy of peace. And that can only happen if there is accountability and an understanding of what is going on.
Farron Cousins: Speaking of, you know, economy of death, the last 48 hours essentially down in Venezuela, absolutely horrible for the country. The US is backing this coup and now we also find out within the last 36 hours that Erik Prince, the big news about him that was overlooked because they want to press charges against him, Erik Prince has actually been shopping around the idea to both the elite in Venezuela and the US government that, hey, let me send my private Blackwater mercenaries down there. A couple thousand of them do the job for you. Pay me $40 million I saw of your problem. It’s disgusting.
But this is the kind of thing that our government has been doing, and this is the kind of thing that whistleblowers are likely to come forward and say, you know what, maybe we shouldn’t have this really creepy guy who did all these horrible things in Iraq, send his private little army down to Venezuela to topple yet another regime. Unfortunately Lee, we are out of time. Thank you very much for talking with me today.
Lee Camp: Absolutely. Thank you.
3) $21 trillion lost: Largest theft in history buried under guise of US national security – Lee Camp
14 May, 2018 12:18 / Updated 1 year ago
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$21 trillion lost: Largest theft in history buried under guise of US national security – Lee Camp
© Reuters / Yuri Gripas
$21 Trillion Lost: Largest theft in history buried under guise of US national security – Lee Camp
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Comedian Lee Camp on his show Redacted Tonight recalls the first-ever audit of the Pentagon, which is taking 2,400 auditors to do the job, trying to understand where $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments went.
In his show, Camp recalled that a couple of years ago professor Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, say that the Department of Defense Inspector General had found $6.5 trillion worth of unaccounted for spending by the Army in 2015.
Skidmore, being an economics professor, thought “she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion”, because “trillion would mean the Pentagon misplaced more money than the Gross Domestic Product of the whole of the United Kingdom” (UK’s GDP $2.62 trillion), Camp said. “So he looked into the Inspector General’s report and he found something interesting: it was 6.5 trillion dollars!”
Read more
Pentagon logistics agency lost track of $800 million – report Pentagon logistics agency lost track of $800 million – report
Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts did more digging and conducted a search of government websites. They found similar reports dating back to 1998. These documents indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments that had been reported for the DoD and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998 -2015.
“If you make 40,000 USD a year, how long would it take you to make one trillion dollars? It would take you 25 million years, which sounds like a long time, but once you get past the ten million mark, it really flies by,” Camp noted.
As Forbes magazine pointed out, after Mark Skidmore began inquiring about the report, the Office of the Inspector General’s webpage was mysteriously taken down.
Given that the entire army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $122 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress, the magazine said. The Inspector General report indicated that unsupported adjustments were the result of the Defense Department’s “failure to correct system deficiencies”.
Lee Camp noted that mainstream media didn’t pay due attention to the story which he describes as “the largest theft in history covered up under the guise of national security.”
WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE: