The Pentagon Has Never Been Audited & Trillions Of Dollars Are Unaccounted For. Where Has It Gone?

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by Kalee Brown, Collective Evolution

An audit refers to an official financial examination, to which every person, corporation, and government organization in the United States is subject. To be exempt from an audit or to not be audited on an annual basis is practically unheard of, even if a business makes a small amount of money. So, why doesn’t the Pentagon, the headquarters for the United States Department of Defense — which accounts for 54% of the U.S. government discretionary spending — get audited?

To be clear, this is illegal. Legislation that was passed in the early 90s states that all government agencies must be audited on an annual basis. The Pentagon has not been audited for the past 20 years, yet there have been no legal consequences. Instead, the U.S. government awards the Department of Defense with billions of dollars annually. Why does the Pentagon get special treatment from the U.S. government and what exactly is it hiding?

Why the Pentagon Is Long Overdue for an Audit

If you can believe it, the Pentagon has never been audited, despite the fact that it receives the greatest amount of funding from the U.S. government. As a result, an astounding $10 trillion in tax payer money has gone completely unaccounted for since 1996.

“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” the director of the Audit the Pentagon coalition, Rafael DeGennaro, explained. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”

Not only has the Pentagon’s budget increased year after year, but it will continue to do so without question, despite the fact that tons of this money is wasted or unaccounted for. In fact, just last week President Donald Trump released the preliminary budget proposal, outlining a $52 billion rise in military spending.

This seems strange, especially after the Washington Post exposed just last year that the Pentagon buried a report that proved they wasted $125 billion. The Pentagon tried to hide this internal study out of fear that the U.S. government would decrease its budget, making it more than a little ironic that the Trump administration chose to increase it instead. You can read about this in our CE article here.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has published ample evidence proving the Pentagon has poorly managed its finances, such as when it lost $500 million in U.S. military aid to Yemen. The public feared that the military equipment would be found and used by terrorist groups, although this wouldn’t be anything new, since the U.S. government already sells arms to terrorist groups overseas. You can read more about that in our CE article here.

This isn’t the only time the Pentagon lost money, either; the army lost $5.8 billion, which it claimed was the result of moving equipment between reserve and regular units. The Pentagon Inspector General explained in a 2012 report that units “may experience equipment shortages that could hinder their ability to train soldiers and respond to emergencies.”

It seems like the Pentagon is the one government organization that desperately needs to be audited, yet it continuously refuses to be, claiming that collecting and organizing the required data for an audit would be too expensive and time-consuming. Given that the budget has continuously increased, how is this a sound argument?

There has been significant push for the Pentagon to be audited from the public and politicians from both sides of the political spectrum, including Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz. You hear about people and businesses getting haggled and pushed around to provide information to auditors, so why hasn’t the Pentagon received that same treatment?

The Pentagon’s Ties to the Private Sector and the Black Budget 

Many people argue that the Pentagon’s lack of accountability goes far beyond the control of the government. Despite the shadow government’s efforts to keep transparency at a minimum, it’s very clear that the elite and corporations strongly influence the government, including the military.

According to William Hartung, the Director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, private contractors significantly benefit from the Pentagon’s confusion regarding its funds. Hartung explains that contractors will “periodically intervene to try to stop practices that would make them more accountable.”

One company that hugely benefits from this is Lockheed Martin, as its F-35 fighter-jet program is seriously flawed, yet the government turns a blind eye to this. Hartung explains, “The concept is: benefit from a dysfunctional system because they can charge however much they want and there’s not a lot of quality control.”

Lockheed Martin also holds strong ties to the black budget program, which refers to government programs that are highly classified and operate in secrecy, otherwise known as Special Access Programs (SAPs). Journalist Bill Sweetman determined that approximately 150 SAPs aren’t acknowledged by the government, and most of the government higher ups and high ranking military personnel aren’t even aware of them. That’s because most of these programs are dominated by private contractors like Lockheed Martin. Read more about this in our CE article here.

Lockheed Martin’s Second Director of Skunk Works, Ben Rich, referred to its involvement in these programs, explaining, “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects. It would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do. We have the technology to take ET home.”

The Washington Post revealed that a staggering $52.6 billion was set aside for black budget operations in fiscal year 2013, all of which are “top secret.” It’s important to note that this is only the known amount of funds allocated to the black budget; many other government officials have suggested that these programs receive a lot more funding.

Paul Hellyer, Canada’s former Minister of National Defence, stated in 2008:

It is ironic that the U.S. would begin a devastating war, allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction, when the most worrisome developments in this field are occurring in your own backyard. It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy, when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which both the Congress and the Commander in Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark. (2)

What he’s referring to are the highly classified SAPs, which tie into the large amount of money that’s unaccounted for at the Pentagon. On July 16, 2001, in front of the house appropriations committee, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: “The financial systems of the department of defence are so snarled up that we can’t account for some $2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if that’s believable.”

It’s no wonder that the Pentagon continuously refuses to be audited. Just last year the Pentagon was exposed for paying a PR firm $500 million to create fake terrorist videos to paint Al-Qaeda in a negative light (read more about that here). If the Pentagon is involved with false-flag terrorism and the seriously deep-rooted 9/11 propaganda campaign, what else is it hiding?

The Department of Defense’s involvement in black budget programs and blatant overspending and loss of assets puts its reputation into serious question. Combine this with its close ties to the private sector and false-flag terrorism, and it becomes obvious that it’s time for the Pentagon to be audited so we can finally shed some light on their operations.

 


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