by Lee Camp
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.
—
If you think this column is
important, please share it. Also you can join Lee Camp’s free email
newsletter here.
This column is based on a
monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted Tonight.”
No comments:
Post a Comment