Total Information Awareness
What, you thought they shut this program down because Congress told them to? How naïve can some people be? Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra was in charge of the program. For those who have forgotten, Iran-Contra was a scheme to fund a program that Congress told the executive to shut down, and refused to fund.
Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat writes about military credit searches and wiretaps, and people wonder what’s going on?
Charles at the Fulcrum thinks that the Shrubbery may be stealing because $5.6 billion for the deployment of 21,500 troops is totally out of line. Consider the fact that most of this increase is achieved by extending deployments and deploying people early, not with troops from outside the system. Most of these costs should already be accounted for in the current appropriations.
They are still gathering information and plugging it into their TIA project. Since Congress refused to fund it and told them to stop it, I think for some time the Pentagon has been moving money out of other accounts to pay for it.
Congress funded body and vehicle armor, but it never showed up. Congress funded the utility bills of military bases, but the bases haven’t paid them. We have depots filled with vehicles that need to be fixed, but there is no money to do it.
I don’t have the slightest doubt that a real audit of any of the current departments of this administration would reveal multiple sets of books, or no recognizable accounting system in place. None of their budget numbers have any significance or meaning.
A number of people have said they are running the government like a business – Enron. We should be so lucky. Enron was creative, but there were books that you could use to figure out what they were doing. I don’t think these people actually know where their money is, or where it is going.
Six years of Republican Congresses have been involved in one of the biggest frauds in history, and it doesn’t make much difference if it was caused by criminal intent or incompetence.
The next President needs Eliot Spitzer for Attorney General. He knows how to prosecute these cases and could get some of our money back.
4 comments
Amen to Eliot Spitzer – and I am hoping some day he will BE the president. The more I read about him, the more impressed I am.
Not only will we need a Spitzer-type as Attorney General, we will need a whole army of dedicated fraud-fighters to tackle this mess.
They are playing with out money and it is not being used to pay for what is needed, no matter which side of the aisle you’re from. They are ignoring any and all controls and restrictions.
Some of the money may go to friendly contractors… Or it may be money to prepare to invade Iran. After, deploying a carried and it’s strike force to the area to fight an urban insurgency doesn’t make sense. However, if you wanted to fight against a country’s army… say… Iran… Well, that would make more sense…
Can’t take credit for this… it’s all Ted Koppel. But I agree
Oh, they have a lot of uses for this money that no one would approve of and they would have to use contractors because government employees might figure out the whole thing was illegal and blow the whistle on the tactics being used. They definitely are looking for an excuse to bomb Iran, which would be disastrous for the US forces in Iraq and oil production in the Gulf region.