OPINOINS BASED
ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU MAY
HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
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OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-01
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Jan. 02, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-02
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Jan. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-03
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Jan. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-04
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Jan. 24, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-05
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JAN 30, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06
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Feb. 06, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06 EXTRA
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Feb. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-07
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Feb. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-08
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Feb. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-09
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Feb. 27, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-10
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Mar. 08, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11
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Mar. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11 EXTRA
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Mar. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-12
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Mar. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-13
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Mar. 29, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-14
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Apr. 03, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-15
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Apr. 12, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-16
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Apr. 19, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-17
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Apr. 26, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-18
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May 03,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-19
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May 10,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-20
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May 20,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 21
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May 28, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - Ho 22
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June 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 23
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June 20, 2014
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noteOBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 24
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July 04, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 25
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Aug. 04, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 26
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Aug. 25, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 27
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Sept. 03, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 28
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Sept. 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 29
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Sept. 14, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 30
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Sept. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 31
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Sept. 29, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 32
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Oct. 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 33
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Oct. 31, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 34
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Nov. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 35
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Nov. 16, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 36
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Nov. 25, 2014
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Agenda
1.
Thought about ISIS war.
2.
Senate rejects Keystone XL pipeline.
3.
Obama's Immigration Ex. Order.
4.
The
last days of Tamas Young.
5.
Prosecutors troubled by extent of military fraud.
THOUGHTS ABOUT FIGHTING
THE ISIS
By Floyd Bowman
Publisher "Opinions Based On
Facts."
November 23, 2014
I was flipping around on the tube the other day, and I came across a western movie
entitled "Monte Walsh." The
description of what to expect was "In early 1800s, western cowboys were
fighting back against eastern corporations that were buying up land in the
west." The items we are fighting
against now may be different, but not entirely.
We are still fighting against corporations about land rights from Canada to the Gulf of
Mexico. Also, land rights
for protecting our precious wildlife, plus many other things. It is still the people fighting the
corporations.
Over in the middle-east they have
been fighting about ethnic problems and land since before Christ time. And, of course, they are still fighting. The only difference is that they keep drawing
us back into it. What goes around comes around and what comes around goes around. It's a vicious cycle.
WHY ANYONE THINKS THAT WE
CAN CHANGE THAT, HAS TO BE OUT OF THEIR EVER LOVEN MIND.
Looking
back at the beginning of the action against the ISIS, BB GW `2
President Obama said that we would not be sending ground forces into Iraq. That we would be jointed by other countries,
and that we would limit our action to air strikes. Shortly thereafter, he sent 1,400 ground
forces to Iraq
as, he said, "training personnel," what next? Yes, you probably either guessed it or
already know, that last week, on Nov. 10 he deployed an additional 1,500. That is almost 3,000 ground troops in Iraq.
Yes,
they are suppose to "advise and train," but folks, I have heard this
tune before. One account I read, said
that these troops will "advise and train troops that are on the front
line." If they are going to train
and advise troops on the front line, it seems to me that our training troops
would have to be on the front line also.
So, that is the beginning of our troops in a ground war. He has said that there is one thing that
would bring about our troops fighting a ground war over there and that would be
if he found out that the ISIS had obtained a
nuclear weapon.
Now
don't get me wrong, if that is what he feels is necessary then so be it, but we
have gone down this same road before. I
personally, do not want to see us in another all out ground war in Iraq for
another 10 years. The cost in terms of
money and more important than money, the cost in American lives, to fight, yet,
another war over there, particularly when I would very much doubt that we can
win, is just plain stupid. We cannot
stop wars that have been going on for centuries.
When I write something
like this, I always have to stop and realize that I am sitting here in the comfort
of my home, writing my opinion based on the information that I am able to
obtain. BUT, I, nor you, do not have the
information that the President has and that could make all the difference. So, I will give him the benefit of the doubt.
~~~
Senate Rejects Bid to Force Approval of Keystone XL Tar
Sands Pipeline
Posted November 18, 2014
Despite
strong lobbying by oil-industry allies, the U.S. Senate tonight defeated an
effort to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The Senate vote reaffirms a commitment to
fight climate change. Taking leadership
sometimes means saying “no”. This bill would have turned Congress into a
permitting authority, overriding environmental law, and giving a green light to
a pipeline project that would worsen climate change and threaten water quality.
The Senate did the right thing to reject
the misguided bill, and now the president should do the right thing and reject
the tar sands pipeline.
Today was a good day for American leadership, showing that
the big polluter agenda doesn’t stand up. There are likely to be many attempts to
undermine our health and environment in the coming months, and we will need the
same kind of leadership we saw tonight to protect our air, climate, lands and
water.
If we are to be serious about fighting climate change, we
can’t allow climate-busting projects like the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to
move forward. In this case, the decision
on Keystone XL is where it belongs — with the president. After reiterating the
need to allow the State Department process the time to conclude, the President
recently noted:
“I have to constantly push back against the idea that
Keystone is either a massive jobs bill for the U.S. or is somehow lowering gas
prices. Understand what the project is,
it will provide the ability for Canada to pump their oil and send it through
our land down to the Gulf where it will be sold everywhere else.”
The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is all risk and no
reward for America.
The pipeline would carry Canadian tar
sands oil across America’s
heartland to the Gulf coast, where much of it would be exported to foreign
buyers. Once built, the pipeline would create fewer than fifty permanent jobs. It would take us backward at a time when many
communities across our country are experiencing the impacts of climate change
through severe weather, coastal storms, and crippling droughts.
The fact that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would
enable a significant increase in carbon intensive tar sands production is what
makes it so undermining of American leadership to address climate change. Tar sands crude is significantly more carbon
intensive than conventional crude. Just
the additional emissions from the tar sands in Keystone XL — above average
emissions from producing non-tar sands oil — are equal to Americans driving
more than 60 billion additional miles every year. Meeting climate stabilization will be practically
impossible if the tar sands resource is developed at projected rates and
Keystone XL is critical to this expansion. With climate change already harming our
communities and pocketbooks across America now is the time for clean
energy, not expansion of dirty energy such as tar sands.
American leadership on climate comes in many forms. We
saw it as 400,000 people turned out in New
York City in September to march for climate action. We see it in President Obama’s climate action
plan. We see it in the US-China climate agreement. And we saw it as the Senate voted to reject
the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
The Keystone XL tar sands
pipeline is not in our national interest. It’s not a plan to help our
country. It’s about big profits for big
oil — and big pollution for the rest of us. It’s a terrible idea, and it needs to be
denied.
~~~
Everything
You Need To Know About Obama's Executive Amnesty
From Floyd:
Just want to write some thoughts about this action and others that he is contemplating. I believe that the President has decided
that, while he has said he will continue to reach out to the Republican Congress,
he is going take a number of actions on his own. He knows that the Congress is not going to
work with him so that he can get things done that he really wants. Couple that with the fact that he is done
politically and that he really wants to accomplish some more before his time is
over, he just is going to move ahead, regardless of what others think.
He knows that there will be more talk of impeachment, but it will never
happen. He knows that if they, the
Congress, threatens to shut down the government, he can stop it. It is a very bold move, but he can. It was done during the Clinton administration.
I believe this is the type of governing we will see during the next two
years. If, he does this, he will go down
in history as a successful President. I,
for one, hope this is the route he is going to take.
~
In a primetime
address on November 20, President Obama made his sales pitch to the American
people for a series of immigration executive actions he will sign on
November 21 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Here is what you need to know:
What actions is Obama taking specifically?
The key to
Obama's new immigration policy is the creation of
one new amnesty program and the expansion of another.
Obama is also
expanding the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals amnesty program. Previously only those illegal immigrants who
were born before 1981 and entered the U.S. as a minor before 2007
were eligible for benefits. Now all illegal immigrants who entered the U.S.
as a minor before 2010 will be eligible for amnesty. Like the parents above, DACA recipients will
also get work permits, Social Security numbers, and driver's licenses. Pew estimates that 235,00 illegal immigrants will gain
eligibility for benefits through this program expansion.
Is this legal?
Obama didn't think
so. As recently as this spring, and on more than 20 other occasions, Obama
said he could not rewrite immigration law by executive action.
Specifically, this
March Obama told Univision, "But what I’ve said in
the past remains true, which is until Congress passes a new law, then I am
constrained in terms of what I am able to do. ... t at a certain point the
reason that these deportations are taking place is, Congress said, ‘you have to
enforce these laws.’ They fund the hiring of officials at the department that’s
charged with enforcing. And I cannot
ignore those laws any more than I could ignore, you know, any of the other laws
that are on the books.
More damning, in
2011, Obama told the National Council of La Raza,
"Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that's not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is
written."
How is Obama justifying this amnesty?
The Office of Legal Counsel memo released
before Obama's speech cites Obama's Article II Section 3 constitutional
duty to "take care that the Laws be faithfully executed" as the
source of his power to grant this amnesty.
The memo reasons
that since there are 11.3 million illegal immigrants in the country today, and
DHS only has the resources to remove 400,000 illegal immigrants every year,
Obama must choose which immigrants to deport and which to ignore. This "prosecutorial discretion"
power, the memo claims, allows Obama to choose which illegal immigrants
get work permits, which illegal immigrants will continue to be
ignored, and which illegal immigrants will be deported.
Under this legal
theory, Obama could give all current 11.3 million illegal immigrants work
permits and driver's licenses, as long as he kept deporting at least 400,000
illegal border crossers every year.
Will courts let Obama get away with this?
They already have. In 2012, after Obama announced his DACA
program, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents sued the Department of
Homeland Security challenging the legality of Obama's first
executive amnesty program.
But while the court found that the border agents "were
likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Department of
Homeland Security has implemented a program contrary to congressional
mandate." The court also
ultimately determined that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue DHS
since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 already established an
administrative process for resolving disputes between federal employees and
their employer.
The harms from
Obama's illegal amnesty programs are just too diffuse for any one litigant to
establish standing in federal court.
If courts can't stop Obama in time, who can?
Only Congress can
stop Obama's amnesty program by defunding it.
Now it is true that
since the federal agency that issues work permits, the United States Citizen
and Immigration Services office, is self-funded through fees it would
keep issuing permits in the event of a federal government shutdown.
But that does not
mean Congress does not have any power over the agency. Congress could still attach a rider to any
appropriations bill forbidding USCIS from using any federal funds, including
those collected through fees, for the purpose of carrying out Obama's amnesty
programs.
Will Congress stop Obama?
Some in Congress,
like Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), have said they will use
the power over the purse to defund Obama's amnesty.
Others like House
Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
have said they want to pass a long-term government funding bill which would
essentially rubber stamp Obama's amnesty.
How would Obama's amnesty effect legal immigrants?
After Obama enacted DACA, wait times for visas for legal
immigrants tripled from 5 months to 15. Obama essentially allowed illegal immigrants
to jump in line in front of law-abiding legal immigrants. Since Obama has requested no new funding from
Congress to pay for his new amnesty, and since his new amnesty is three times
larger than his last amnesty, legal immigrants should not only expect to
head to the back of the line again, but they should also expect much
longer delays.
Obama claims all these amnestied immigrants will get background
checks, Is that true?
If history is any
guide, no. Background checks are
expensive and time consuming and USCIS does not have the resources to process
additional amnesty programs on top of their normal duties. Judicial Watch
uncovered documents in June 2013 showing that instead
of full background checks normally used by the agency, DACA recipients got
cheaper and less comprehensive "lean and lite" checks.
33Obama said illegal immigrants will be held accountable
by paying taxes. Is that true?
How will Obama pay for this new amnesty program?
The White House has
not explained that yet.
What about Democrats who claim Reagan and Bush also acted
unilaterally on immigration?
President Reagan
did pass an amnesty program through Congress in 1986, but it failed to
accomplish its goals. At the time there
were just 3 million illegal immigrants in the country and today there are more
than 11 million. This is why most
Americans do not support amnesty today.
Reagan
also used an executive action to ease immigration standards for
200,000 Nicaraguans who feared persecution from the communist Sandinista
regime. President Bush used similar
powers to grant deportation relief to hundreds of Kuwaiti nationals
who had been evacuated to the United
States during the first Gulf War.
But both of these
executive actions were perfectly in line with the true scope of a president's
prosecutorial discretion powers. They were limited in nature, applied to
specific smaller groups of immigrants, and were not designed to thwart congressional
intent on immigration policy.
Obama's amnesty is the
exact opposite. It is a broad-based
program in response to no crisis other than Congress isn't doing what Obama
wants it to do. As Obama once said,
"That's not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is
written."
~~~
The
Last Days of Tomas Young
Tomas
Young was shot and paralyzed below his waist in Iraq
in April 2004 when he and about 20 other U.S. soldiers were ambushed while
riding in the back of an Army truck. He
died of his wounds Nov. 10, 2014, at the age of 34. His final months were marked by a desperate
battle to ward off the horrific pain that wracked his broken body and by the
callous indifference of a government that saw him as part of the disposable
human fodder required for war.
Young
hung on as long as he could. Now he is
gone. He understood what the masters of war had done to him, how he had been
used and turned into human refuse. He
was one
of the first veterans to protest against the Iraq War. Planning to kill himself by cutting off his
feeding tube, he wrote a poignant open “Last Letter” to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
in March of 2013 on the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq.
He knew that Bush and Cheney, along with
other idiotic cheerleaders for the war, including my old employer The New York
Times, were responsible for his paralysis and coming death.
After
issuing the letter Young changed his mind about committing suicide, saying he
wanted to have more time with his wife, Claudia Cuellar, who dedicated her life to his
care. Young and Cuellar knew he did not
have long. The couple would move from Kansas City to Portland, Ore., and then to Seattle,
where Young died.
Young,
who had been in Iraq only five days at the time of the 2004 attack, was hit by
two bullets. One struck a knee and the
other cut his spinal cord. He was
already confined to his bed when I visited him in March 2013 in Kansas City. He was unable to feed himself. He was taking some 30 pills a day. His partly paralyzed body had suffered a
second shock in March 2008 when a blood clot formed in his right arm (which
bore a color tattoo of a character from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things
Are”). He was taken to the Veterans
Affairs hospital in Kansas City,
Mo., given the blood thinner
Coumadin and released.
The VA
took him off Coumadin a month later. The
clot migrated to one of his lungs. He
suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and went into a coma. When he awoke in the hospital his speech was
slurred. He had lost nearly all his
upper-body mobility and short-term memory. He began suffering terrible pain in his
abdomen. His colon was surgically
removed in an effort to mitigate the abdominal pain. He was fitted with a colostomy bag. The pain disappeared for a few days and then
returned. He could not hold down most
foods, even when they were pureed. The
doctors dilated his stomach. He could
eat only soup and oatmeal. And then he
went on a feeding tube.
Veterans
Affairs over the last eight months of Young’s life reduced his pain medication,
charging he had become an addict.
From Floyd: So what did it matter that he was addicted to
the pain medicine. They knew he was
going to pass on before long. Why on
earth they should take that medication away is beyond me. I have personally experienced the same
thing. I have, so far, had 20 more good
years because I have a doctor that understands that if you can extend your good
years, why not?
I have been to pain
clinics and as far as I can tell they are nothing more than a brain washing
machine. They try to tell you to get it
out of you mind. To some degree a person
can do that, but it gets to a point that you can't function at all without
medication. If it isn't hurting you more
in other ways, WHY NOT?
It was a decision that thrust him into a wilderness
of agony.
Young’s
existence became a constant battle with the VA. He suffered excruciating “breakthrough pain.” The
VA was indifferent. It cut his 30-day
supply of pain medication to seven days. Young, when the pills did not arrive on time,
might as well have been nailed to a cross. Cuellar, in an exchange of several emails with
me since Young’s death, remembered hearing her husband on the phone one day
pleading with a VA doctor and finally saying: “So you mean
to tell me it is better for me to live in pain than die on pain medicine in
this disabled state?” At night, she said, he would moan and cry out.
“It was a
battle of wills,” Cuellar told me in one of the emails. “We were losing. Our whole time in Portland was spent dealing with trying to get
what we needed to be at home and comfortable and pain free. THAT’S ALL WE WANTED, TO BE HOME AND PAIN
FREE, to enjoy whatever time we had left.”
Last month
they moved from Portland to Seattle. They would be closer to a good
spinal cord injury unit. Also, Washington was one of
the states that had legalized marijuana, which Young used extensively.
When I
saw Young in Kansas City
last year he told me he had thought of having his ashes sprinkled over a patch
of soil on which marijuana would be planted, “but then I worried that no one
would want to smoke it.” After they moved to Seattle he and Cuellar again pleaded with the
VA for more pain medication, but the VA staff said Young would have to be
evaluated over a two-week period by a “pain team.” This, in my opinion,
is ridiculous. Floyd. The pain team could
not see him until the last week of November. He was dead before then.
“Last
week I called because his breakthrough pain started happening throughout the
day,” Cuellar said in an email. “I was using more and more of the morphine and
Lorazepam. I was running out of pills. He had a high tolerance for pain, but it
was getting bad. I called to report to the doctor that it was getting bad fast.
I would not have enough pills to bridge him to the appointment on the 24th. The doctor was unsympathetic. He gave me a condescending lecture about
strict narcotics regulations. I said,
‘but my husband is in pain what do I do?’ ”
Young
tried to take enough sleeping pills to sleep away the pain. But he was able to
rest for a prolonged period only every few days. The pain and exhaustion began to tear apart
his frail body. He was dispirited. He was visibly weaker. He felt humiliated.
“Maybe he
got so exhausted by the enduring of it all that he took a last sleep and never
came back,” Cuellar wrote. “My conclusion is that he died in pain from the
exhaustion of having to endure it. Early
morning Monday, when I thought he was sleeping, I heard a silence I had never
heard before. I couldn’t hear him
breathing. I was scared, but I knew. The first thing I did was liberate him from
all the tubes and bags on his body. I cut off the feeding tube. I took off the Ostomy Bags. I removed the Foley Catheter. I cleaned his body. I played music. We smoked a last joint together. I smoked for him. I started making calls.”
“The
funeral home instructed me to call the police,” she wrote. “They arrived and
concluded that there were no issues, but because of his young age they had to
refer this to the Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner came. He made the
determination that due to his age that they would have to perform an autopsy. I said, ‘Hey look at his body don’t you think
he has been mutilated enough? Are [you]
going to desecrate his body even further?’ So he was cut open some more.”
The VA
called her to ask for the autopsy report.
Young’s
final days, Cuellar said, were often “hopeless and humiliating.”
It is an
old story. It is the story of war. Two
days after the 9/11 attacks, Young enlisted in the Army, hoping he would be
sent to fight in Afghanistan.
He was seduced by jingoism and calls for
a crusade against evil that he eventually came to realize were a mask for lies
and deceit. He became a voice for other
young people who bore the physical and emotional scars of war. He became our conscience. He spoke a truth about war, a truth many do
not want to hear. And he condemned our
war criminals and demanded justice. He
wrote in his “Last Letter” to Bush and Cheney:
I have, like many other
disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided
by the Veterans Administration. I have,
like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical
wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a
Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am
not a Christian. But I believe in the
Christian ideal. I believe that what you
do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is
upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you
find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many
others who deserved to live. I hope that
before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the
strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in
particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
We must
grieve for Tomas Young, for all the severely wounded men and women hidden from
view, suffering their private torments in claustrophobic rooms, for their
families, for the hundreds of thousands of civilians that have died in Iraq and
Afghanistan, for our own complicity in these wars. We must grieve for a nation that has lost its
way, blinded by the psychosis of permanent war, that kills human beings across
the globe as if they were little more than insects. It is a waste. We will leave defeated from Iraq and Afghanistan; we will leave burdened
with the expenditure of trillions of dollars and responsible for mounds of
corpses and ruined nations. Young, and
here is the tragedy of it, was sacrificed for nothing. Only the masters of war, those who have
profited from the rivers of blood, rejoice. And they know the dead cannot speak.
~~~
Prosecutors Troubled
by Extent of
Military Fraud
ERIC TUCKER Nov 16th
2014 10 :11AM
WASHINGTON (AP) - Fabian Barrera found a way to make fast
cash in the Texas National Guard, earning roughly $181,000 for claiming to have
steered 119 potential recruits to join the military. But the bonuses were ill-gotten because the
former captain never actually referred anyone.
Barrera's case, which ended last month with a prison sentence of at least
three years, is part of what Justice Department lawyers describe as a recurring
pattern of corruption that spans a broad cross section of the military.
In a period when the nation has spent freely to support wars on multiple
fronts, prosecutors have found plentiful targets: defendants who bill for
services they do not provide, those who steer lucrative contracts to select
business partners and those who use bribes to game a vast military enterprise.
Despite numerous cases that have produced long prison sentences, the
problems have continued abroad and at home with a frequency that law
enforcement officials consider troubling.
"The schemes we see really run the gamut from relatively small bribes
paid to somebody in Afghanistan to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of
contracts being steered in the direction of a favored company who's paying
bribes," Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, head of the Justice
Department's criminal division, said in an interview.
In the past few months alone, four retired and one active-duty Army
National Guard officials were charged in a complex bribery and kickback scheme
involving the awarding of contracts for marketing and promotional materials. A
trucking company driver pleaded guilty to bribing military base employees in Georgia to obtain
freight shipments - often weapons which required satellite tracking - to
transport to the West Coast.
More recently, a former contractor for the Navy's Military Sealift Command,
which provides transportation for the service, was sentenced to prison along
with a businessman in a bribery scheme in which cash, a wine refrigerator and
other gifts traded hands in exchange for favorable treatment on
telecommunications work. Also, three
men, including two retired Marine Corps senior officers, were charged with
cheating on a bid proposal for maintenance work involving Marine One
helicopters that service the White House.
Justice Department lawyers say they don't consider the military more
vulnerable to corruption than any other large organization, but that the same
elements that can set the stage for malfeasance - including relatively low-paid
workers administering lucrative contracts, and heavy reliance on
contractor-provided services - also exist in the military.
Jack Smith heads the department's Public Integrity Section, which is best
known for prosecuting politicians but has also brought multiple cases against
service members. He said there are obvious parallels between
corruption in politics and in the military.
"When an American taxpayer is not getting the deal that they should
get, someone is inserting costs that the taxpayers ultimately have to bear, I
think anybody would be offended by that," Smith said. Some cases have stood out.
Defense contractor Leonard Francis was arrested in San Diego last year on charges that he
offered luxury travel, prostitutes and other bribes to Navy officers in
exchange for confidential information, including ship routes. Prosecutors say he used that information to
overbill the Navy for port services in Asia in
one of the biggest Navy bribery scheme in years. Ethan Posner, a lawyer for Francis, declined
comment.
Yet many others involve more mundane cases of contracting or procurement
fraud. Consider the trucking company
operator in Afghanistan who
bribed an Army serviceman to falsify records to show fuel shipments that were
never delivered, or the former Army contractor who demanded bribes before
issuing orders for bottled water at a military camp in Kuwait.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq
and Afghanistan estimated
that between $31 billion and $60 billion was lost to fraud during U.S.
operations in those countries. The
Justice Department says it brought 237 criminal cases from November 2005 to
September 2014 arising from war-zone misconduct - often contracting fraud.
"We just were not equipped to do sufficient oversight and monitoring
on the front end, and we didn't have sufficient accountability mechanisms on
the back end, which led to enormous problems," said Laura Dickinson, a
national security law professor at George Washington University.
The Defense Department has acknowledged the problems and taken steps in the
past decade to tighten controls and improve training.
Domestically, more than two dozen National Guard officials, including
Barrera, the Texas
National Guard captain, have been charged with abusing a recruiting incentive
program in which soldiers could claim bonuses of a few thousand dollars for
each person they said they had recruited.
But prosecutors said soldiers repeatedly cheated the system by claiming
bonuses for ghost referrals.
Army National Guard spokesman Rick Breitenfeldt said the military takes the
matter seriously and two years ago suspended the problematic recruiting
program, known as G-RAP.
"We acknowledge that fraudulent activity took place with this program
and continue to work with law enforcement agencies to identify the accountable
individuals and take appropriate action," he said in a statement.
Caldwell said the Justice Department, even with limited resources, must
have a zero-tolerance policy as a deterrent. "It's really not worth risking your
military career and your reputation - not to mention your freedom - for this
kind of thing," she said.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and the
creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again next week.
God
Bless You All
&
God
Bless the united States of
America
Floyd
