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It constitutes a shocking waste of national resources at a time vital homeland needs go begging, including essential social services being systematically reduced or ended. It also suggests a level of fraud and waste multiple times higher than congressional investigators reported.
In fact, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted on September 10, 2001:
"According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions" because the books are cooked to facilitate rampant Pentagon and defense contractor corruption.
It's theft on the grandest scale, stealing unknown trillions, dwarfed only by much greater stolen Wall Street amounts.
On August 31, AP headlined, "Independent panel warns failure to make contracting reforms risks more wartime waste and fraud," saying:
In Iraq and Afghanistan alone, America "lost billions of dollars to waste and fraud....and stands to repeat that in future wars without big changes in how the government awards and manages contracts for battlefield support and reconstruction projects, independent investigators said...."
Established in 2008, the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) included four members from each party, created to investigate scandalous contractor malfeasance.
Calling its findings "sobering," it said much of what was found could have been avoided. Moreover, "(u)nless changes are made, continued waste and fraud will undercut the effectiveness of money spent in future operations, whether they involve hostile threats overseas or national emergencies here at home requiring military participation and interagency response."
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