by jingofever » Mon Jun 19, 2006 11:38 pm
A few segments from a transcript of a 2003 NOW episode:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>MOYERS: So out of control, says Spinney, that the Pentagon can't account for billions upon billions of the dollars it's spending while its financial books border on pure fiction.<br><br>SPINNEY: We have an accounting system that is unauditable. Every year, they do an audit and the inspector general would issue a report saying we have to wave the audit requirements, issue a disclaimer of opinion because we can't balance the books. We can't tell you how the money got spent.<br><br>MOYERS: Case in point: since 1995, the General Accounting Office has ranked the Defense Department's financial management among the worst in the federal government "… on [the] GAO's list of high-risk areas vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement."<br><br>What's more, in fiscal year 2000, the Defense Department's own inspector general found that the Pentagon could not account for more than $1 trillion — trillion with a "t."<br><br>Spinney says this amounts to a constitutional crisis.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>SPINNEY: Well, you raise a very good point there. The President is holding education people accountable for standards. He says, "I want to have measures, performance measures for accountability." He also tried to do the same for foreign aid if you recall.<br><br>Over in the Pentagon, we're not holding people accountable.<br><br>I think basically here is you have in Congress the oversight committees for defense, which are essentially the Armed Services Committee. And the Defense Appropriations subcommittees in both houses are so tied in to the Pentagon and the defense contractor base that essentially oversight has been displaced by what some of us call "overlook." They're basically watching the money flow out the door and encouraging it to go.<br><br>And basically it's in members of the Senate Armed Services Committee's best interest to keep the money flowing. It's in the Pentagon's best interest to keep the money flowing.<br><br>MOYERS: Because?<br><br>SPINNEY: It's in the defense contractors' best interest to keep the money flowing. Because it's the military industrial Congressional complex and this is their way of life. They live on the money flow.<br><br>MOYERS: The military industrial Congressional complex?<br><br>SPINNEY: Right. Which I believe was a term that Eisenhower considered using in his speech, but he dropped the reference to Congress.<br><br>MOYERS: He talked about the military industrial complex. But you say Congress is the driving force here?<br><br>SPINNEY: I don't think there's any simple villain that you can point to and say, "If we fix this, everything's gonna change. In my opinion it's the product of a long-term evolution that occurred in the 40 years of Cold War. If you think about it those 40 years were a very unique period in our nation's history. Now what happened was during that period the different players in the military industrial Congressional complex basically fine-tuned their bureaucratic behavior to exist in that environment. It was almost like this self-contained environment in which a peculiar evolution took place.<br><br>A lot like the Galapagos Islands and how the beaks on finches changed from island to island. And we developed certain practices in order to generate budgets that were more inwardly focused toward distributing defense pork to our allies around the country.<br><br>And one of the most pernicious effects of this trend was the gradual buildup of what an anthropologist might call habitual modes of conduct. Sort of almost like an innate response of threat inflation. We literally exaggerated the threat to jack up the budgets.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Who is SPINNEY?<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>MOYERS: Chuck Spinney worked inside the Pentagon for almost 30 years, committed to a strong national defense. It's a conviction ingrained in him, as the son of an Air Force colonel and a former Air Force officer himself. But he has a shocking story to tell — one he wants every American to hear.<br><br>...<br><br>MOYERS: Spinney should know. His job at the Pentagon for the last three decades: to analyze the cost and effectiveness of America's weapons. And he says, national security is at risk because the country's not getting what we're paying for.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript245_full.html">www.pbs.org/now/transcrip..._full.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>It is good, y'all should read it. <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=jingofever>jingofever</A> at: 6/19/06 9:39 pm<br></i>
