New Report Reveals Pentagon Missing 8.5 Trillion Dollars

""Yahoo Money' The Daily Ticker  is reporting that is has discovered a Reuters investigation that reveals $8.5 trillion – that's trillion with a "T" – in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.

You read that right. While Republican politicians  rush to slash food stamps for the 47 million Americans living in poverty – the highest amount in nearly two decades –  Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budget are " too steep, too deep, and too abrupt," all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste, and abuse.

For anyone wondering, Reuters reports that the D.O.D.'s 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China.

In an interview, Linda Woodford, an employee at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service – the Pentagon's main accounting agency – reveals to Reuters that she spent the last 15 years of her career simply "plugging in" false numbers every month to balance the books;

"A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn't have the detail ... for a lot of it."

In the REAL WORLD, that would be called MASSIVE FRAUD.

Woodford's involvement in the fraud doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. The report also reveals that "a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion – yes, trillion – in errors,  including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009."

Yahoo Finance lists some additional findings, including;

• The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn't known.
• Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
• The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or "plugs," to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.""
  
  
  
  
  
• http://crooksandliars.com/2015/06/report-reveals-85-trillion-missing

Urban Archaeologist Solves Mystery of Missing Civil War's Submarines?

""A local historian and urban archaeologist thinks he's solved a mystery: What happened to four Confederate submersibles known to be in Shreveport the last two years of the Civil War, but missing in action since then.

Marty Loschen, director of the Spring Street Museum in downtown Shreveport, thinks he's found remnants of the hand-propelled craft in the banks of a branch of Cross Bayou about a half-mile west of where the Confederate Navy had a shipyard. At Cross Bayou's mouth on Red River it was home to the leaky ironclad CSS Missouri and a fast packet, the Webb, whose presence overshadowed the humbler underwater vessels.

Several months ago, before recent rains raised water levels on Cross Bayou and its feeder streams, Loschen and his brother found decades-old rusted metal and some oddly formed tree roots whose shape suggested they had grown over something curved that had long rotted or rusted away. The site was on a bank revealed by low water on Bowman's chute, near Bowman and Dowling Streets in Allendale north of the Canaan Village apartments.

"It's breathtakingly beautiful out there," says Loschen, who spends much of his time exploring the more remote, forgotten and forbidding parts of old Shreveport. He points to the 1864 Venable Map of the defenses of Shreveport which shows several small buildings near where he found the artifacts.

"There's your sub base," he said. "On the Venable map there's an island out there. My theory is if you're going to have a clandestine sub base, you're going to put it out there. Look, there are structures out there, near what I found out beached — it has to be."

He's waiting for another period of low water.

"It's under at least 10 feet of water now," he said. "I'm trying to wait for the water to go down to go see those subs."

Famed diver Ralph Wilbanks, who found the wreck of the submarine CSS Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995, visited Shreveport twice in the last 15 years to search for the local submarines at the behest of best-selling author Clive Cussler, who also drove the search for the Hunley.

Wilbanks and a team of well-known fellow diver-researchers performed sonar and magnetometer searches of Red River and parts of Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, finding traces of old trucks from the flapper era, a dock that once served as a ferry link between Shreveport and Bossier City before bridges were built across the Red, and the remains of a Civil War gunboat, the Iron Duke.

But Wilbanks never went as far back into the murkier and shallower waters of Cross Bayou near where it traces its way through Ledbetter Heights and Allendale on its way to Cross Lake. Loschen's sub site is just west of where Wilbanks' surveys stopped.""

Finish Article:

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/2015/01/23/civil-war-subs-lost/22232231/