The Pentagon's Criminal Behavior

When I say "criminal behavior" I don't mean "war crimes", although there are plenty of those that need to be addressed.
Instead, I'm talking about "behaving like a criminal" in a law enforcement sort of way.

The U.S. Department of Defense is reportedly still funneling billions of dollars’ worth of Soviet-era weaponry to anti-Islamic State groups in Syria, with questionable oversight.
In a joint report published Tuesday, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) allege that the Pentagon has given up to $2.2 billion worth of weapons to groups like the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG.

So far this story is a scandal, but not a shocking one. It's what one might expect.
However, the next couple paragraphs cast the news in an entirely different light.

The program sidesteps long-established checks on international weapons trafficking, the report alleges, and appears to be turbocharging a shadowy world of Eastern European arms dealers.
In particular, the Pentagon is reportedly removing documentary evidence about just who will ultimately be using the weapons, potentially weakening one of the bulwarks of international protocols against illicit arms dealing.
“The Pentagon is removing any evidence in their procurement records that weapons are actually going to the Syrian opposition,” Ivan Angelovski, one of the report’s authors, told Foreign Policy.

What sort of organization destroys documents to hide its activities?
A criminal organization.

Legally, however, shipments like the ones that started flowing to groups in Syria are supposed to include information on the end-user of the weapons. Instead, according to the report, the Defense Department decided to allow the transfer of equipment to any army or militia it provides security assistance to — including Syrian rebels — without any clear documentation.
...The United States is “undermining the object and purpose” of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty, Patrick Wilcken, an arms control researcher at Amnesty International, told the investigators. Another expert on conflict prevention said U.S. manipulation of the system could put the the entirety of the international arms control regime at risk.
In addition to the potential legal consequences of the Pentagon’s program, the report also documents issues with the acquisition process itself.
According to the report, many of the weapons suppliers — primarily in Eastern Europe but also in the former Soviet republics, including Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Ukraine — have both links to organized crime throughout Eastern Europe and spotty business records.

This is outrageous! We should be throwing generals in jail right and left for this.
This is a rogue organization undermining national security.
Instead, it's just an obscure "report".

No government agency gets away with sh*t the way our military does.
For instance, remember this from last year?

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.
As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”
Disclosure of the Army’s manipulation of numbers is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades.

If SNAP made up a couple million dollars in its books, it wouldn't be called a "severe accounting problem".
It would be called fraud. But rules don't apply to the MIC.

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Steven D's picture

Those generals need to keep the wars going so they can get nice little sinecures at defense companies when they retire from the US Armed Forces.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

@Steven D
unless those retirement jobs involve working with criminal arms traffickers.

Which would be outside-the-box thinking.

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Steven D's picture

@gjohnsit that the more weapons are out there and the more they fall into the "terrists" hands (regardless of source), the more justification for more weapons for the Pentagon (and our allies - don't forget them) to fight the bad guys.

Of course I'm sure that there is the usual amount of theft by the lower ranks, but what makes this so obscene is the military's failure to audit themselves. But then, they are under no pressure whatsoever to do so. Not from Congress, not from the defense contractors, not from our last however many Presidents and of course not from our media.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

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Song of the lark's picture

up we are going to need some of that materiel.

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Meteor Man's picture

They are acting just like American Law Enforcement did (and maybe still does) with civil asset forfeiture:

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/jul/28/policing-profit-law-enf...

Cops are the largest domestic drug cartel in America. Is there any question that the C.I.A. funnels drug profits into their private accounts? War is a lucrative racket and American Warlords are getting their share of the blood money endless war generates.

Who's gonna stop them? American Generals Warlords do not go to prison.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

an

international arms control regime?

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divineorder's picture

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

of America's MIC to be dominated by thoroughly amoral men, who regard "the Law" as being more of an inconvenience, than any sort of guiding principle. The underlying goals of America's ruling elite, and its FP establishment, are based on the acquisition of unlimited power and wealth... nothing more and nothing less. Ideology serves US foreign policy as a tool to help achieve these goals, but ideology itself is regarded as having little or no intrinsic value. Nor has it retained much integrity apart from them.

CIA dirty tricks, gun running, drug smuggling, covert infiltrations, and regime-changing operations are all par for the course. They've been going on for ages, as the official Government routinely turns a blind eye to them, or bails out the perpetrators who occasionally do get caught. No one ever goes to jail for these things. Least of all the Generals who order them, and not even the Colonels who execute them. In fact these "criminals" are much more likely to be promoted than prosecuted.

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native

detroitmechworks's picture

the american justice system.

If you're a 1%er, (General) you can do whatever you want, and nobody can stop you except another 1%er.

If you're an enforcer for the 1% (Major and Above), you can be charged with crimes, and slapped on the wrist or demoted, but you aren't really on the hook.

If you're a member of the 99% (Captain and below), if the 1% feels like it, you're completely fucked. If you do ANYTHING, and they feel like screwing with you, your life in the service is over, and if they really hate you, your civilian life too.

Still remember the E-7 Armorer who decided to do the standard military thing and make a little profit off the war, by buying 8 AK-47 copies from the locals for about a hundred bucks each, and planning to resell them back in the states for a cool 2-3,000 dollars. He got busted in customs... The same base which allowed Major Hassan to stroll through the front gate with loaded weapons where every single low ranks soldier was disarmed.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Meteor Man's picture

In addition to Health Care For All, an immediate substantial reduction in military spending should be a litmus test for all Democrats. Yeah, you heard me right Bernie! I'm talking to you! Get off the forever war bandwagon or go home!

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man
that almost no one in Washington has the guts to speak out against these useless wars.
Almost no one has the guts to speak out against our bloated military budget.

Just imagine if someone finally did.

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@gjohnsit see Joe's EB.

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divineorder's picture

@gjohnsit js eb had the video of his speech.

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

TheOtherMaven's picture

Sometimes they come close to being synonyms.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.