Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste

Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward, Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste. The Washington Post, 5 December 2016. “The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post. Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.”

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The Pentagon’s Missionary Spies

Matthew Cole, The Pentagon’s Missionary Spies. The Intercept, 26 October 2015. “U. S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage…. The revelation that the Pentagon used an NGO and unwitting humanitarian volunteers for intelligence gathering is the result of a months long investigation by The Intercept. In the course of the investigation, more than a dozen current and former military and intelligence officials, humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, U.S. officials, and former HISG [Humanitarian International Services Group] staffers were interviewed. The U.S. government officials who were familiar with the Pentagon operation and HISG’s role asked for anonymity because discussing classified military and intelligence matters would put them at risk of prosecution. The Pentagon had no comment on HISG or the espionage operations in North Korea.”

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Top Secret America: describes the huge national security buildup in the US after 11 September 2001

Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America. The Washington Post, Four-part series, 19, 20 and 21 July and 20 December 2010. “The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it’s fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping its citizens safe.”

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