Secret military spending gets little oversight

It took more than a decade for Mitchell Wade to turn his company, MZM Inc., from a small-time Pentagon consulting firm into a booming business that had nearly $200 million in government contracts.

Earlier this year, it took just a few months for it to fall apart. In June, the Pentagon revoked MZM's biggest contract, which had brought in more than $160 million in work for the company.

Wade also stepped down as the company's leader and sold its assets to a private equity firm after reports surfaced earlier in June of Wade's allegedly inflated purchase of a home owned by Rep. Randy Cunningham (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif.

The rise and fall of MZM opened a window into the world of classified Pentagon spending and how Congress monitors it. Each year, billions of dollars are spent on classified projects that have little, if any, public oversight.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/secretmilitaryspendinggetslittleoversight

This from the Defense Secrtary's September 10, 2001 speech:

"Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."

http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010910-secdef.html

the extreme detriment of our country. May a full review of all contracts let by this Administration begin the day after it is no more.

http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/cunningham.php

Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-CA)

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) is an eighth-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the 50th district of California. His ethical violations arise from his relationships with individuals and entities from which he has benefitted financially, as well as his misuse of the congressional seal.
Rep. Cunningham's relationship with MZM and Mitchell Wade

In late 2003, defense contractor Mitchell Wade purchased Rep. Cunningham's Del Mar, California home for $1.675 million. Property sales records show that the average sales price for similar-size homes in the same area was at least $500,000 less than the price Mr. Wade paid for Rep. Cunningham's home. Mr. Wade resold the property in October 2004 for $975,000, taking a $700,000 loss on the property.

In Washington, over a 15-month period, Rep. Cunningham lived on a 42-foot yacht, the Duke-Stir, anchored at a marina on the Potomac River and owned by Mr. Wade. Rep. Cunningham told reporters that rather than paying rent for the yacht, he paid over $8,000 in docking fees and $5,000 in maintenance costs. Based on current market rates, however, a yacht sales broker recently estimated that the rental market value of the yacht would have been approximately $600 more per month.

Mr. Wade and his defense contracting firm MZM, Inc. have contributed more than $50,000 to Rep. Cunningham's political committees since 2000. The financial relationship between Rep. Cunningham and MZM appears to have commenced in 2000, when MZM made a $5,000 corporate contribution to the American Prosperity PAC State Fund, a non-federal account created by Rep. Cunningham under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code. In 2001, MZM donated an additional $10,000 to the PAC.

...more...

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/07/02/news/top_stories/20_13_257_1_05.txt

Feds raid Cunningham home, MZM offices and boat

Dozens of federal agents conducted searches at opposite ends of the nation Friday in a widening investigation of U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, breaking into his Rancho Santa Fe home and carrying away boxes of evidence from the house and from a contractor's office in Washington, D.C.

Agents spent hours combing Cunningham's home, an action his attorneys called "strong-arm tactics" designed to generate headlines.

Cunningham is under fire for his dealings with the defense contracting firm MZM, Inc. and its owner, Mitchell J. Wade, who bought a house from the congressman and then sold it for $700,000 less than what he paid.

Cunningham has denied any wrongdoing.

Also searched were MZM's offices, Wade's home in northwest Washington and his boat, which Cunningham used as a residence from April 2004 until recently.

The FBI confirmed its role in the searches, which stem from a criminal investigation being directed by the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego and in Washington.


An aerial view of U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's Rancho Santa Fe home after it was raided by federal agents on Friday.

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""Weiner, Tim. Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget. New York: Warner Books, 1991. 273 pages.
This book is based on Tim Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Philadelphia Inquirer. By following the money, Weiner finds appropriations of public dollars for highly-compartmentalized, secret research projects with no accountability to either Congress or the Secretary of Defense. The secret budget has never been published, a violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.
Reagan doubled the Pentagon budget between 1981 and 1985, and by 1991 Bush had increased the "black" portion to 25 percent. Born from the Manhattan Project, described by Weiner as a "mutant chromosome in the American body politic," this secret operation is now a full-blown parallel government.

Weiner shows the secret government at work in diverting funds illegally, creating military units outside the chain of command, conducting covert wars, and transforming Star Wars into a system for the control of space. This book is a solidly-documented description of how the U.S. responded to atomic weapons and the Cold War by giving birth to, nurturing, and ultimately succumbing to a national security state.""

http://www.namebase.org/sources/PR.html

Today's paper shows an overall intell budget of $44 billion. What we don't know about is the secret, undocumented unsupervised 'black' ops budget. Drug money probably funds much of this (as Alfred McCoy's Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade points out), but that then begs the question what other potential domestic crimes are being committed in funding the 'off the books' ops ?

Also begs question, do certain congressmen receive cuts of this black budget cash for their campaigns ? It brings to mind the Worthen Bank and BCCI cashflows that funded both Clinton and Shrub. Just a thought

The strange saga of BCCI
www.the-catbird-seat.net/BCCI.htm

Nine bil disappears in Iraq, and there's a congressional shrug.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

excerpt:

More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.

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