In the aftermath of allegations of misuse of funds meant to rebuild Afghanistan, The Senate Judiciary Committee chair has asked the Pentagon whether an Army colonel who had whistle-blown on the wasteful nature of the Afghan aid task force was being punished for taking a stand.
John Hope is the Army Colonel in question, and he is in the best position to judge whether the funds had been corruptly misused: he was formerly the director of the Afghanistan Task Force for Business Stability Operations- the five-year program that was supposedly intended to restart the Afghan economy, but which is now defunct.
“After the Task Force disbanded, I basically became unemployed, because I never got Officer Evaluation Report (OER) you need to get your next assignment,” he said, explaining that he had previously been recommended for promotion to brigadier general. “It’s now eight months late, and I’m still waiting. Right now, I’m stuck.”
“From the beginning, there was no property book officer, ” he said. “We even had weapons that had gone missing for two years, and no one was keeping track.”
Hope says that he was “singled out for retaliation and retribution” because he had exposed the lack of accountability of the spending.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley had sent DoD Seccretary Ashton Carter a letter asking about how they had treated Hope.
Hope had informed Grassley of the Pentagon’s apparent retaliation, after it had put his performance review on hold.
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko, appointed by congress to investigate waste in the program, had earlier revealed that the Pentagon had spent 140 times more than it should have cost to build a compressed Natural gas station in Afghanistan. Sopko stated that the Pentagon was stonewalling his investigation.
“SIGAR has received more allegations about TFBSO than any other program in Afghanistan,” Inspector General John F. Sopko told VICE News, noting that the investigation is still underway. “We are currently talking with numerous individuals, including Colonel Hope.”
Senator Grassley wrote this to Ashton Carter:
“Being long overdue, (the evaluation) has placed his next assignment in jeopardy, leaving him in limbo. Would you please look into this and find out why Colonel Hope’s (evaluation) has not been completed? I respectfully ask that you provide a deadline for completing that task and providing Colonel Hope with a new set of orders for his next assignment. Your assistance is necessary in this case.”
Of the subject of the CNG station, Grassley, who has raised concerns over the project in the past, said its cost “remains unexplained, unjustified, and undocumented and is in need of congressional and administration oversight and scrutiny.“
The Pentagon has refused to allow Sopko access to task force’s former acting director, Joseph Catalino, or documents that could explain the massive spending discrepancy.
“DOD spent nearly $800 million on TFBSO, but now they claim no one knows anything about it,” Sopko said. “DOD made $800 million disappear, and now they have made the agency disappear too.”
Democrat Ron Wyden had earlier used Sopko’s revelations to request for an audit which will take place in 2017.
Senator Kelly Ayotte has also schedueled a hearing on the matter, which will take place next month.
Senator Claire McCaskill has also said that this was one of the most heinous cases of wasteful spending she had witnessed:
“There are few things in this job that literally make my jaw drop,” she said in a statement. “But of all the examples of wasteful projects in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Pentagon began prior to our wartime contracting reforms, this genuinely shocked me.”
Sources: RT
This Article (Whistleblower “Singled Out For Retaliation And Retribution” For Exposing Pentagon’s $800,000,000 Disappearing Act) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
I have a question; I remember watching on TV about a whole lot of USA dollars being fount during the war and nothing else has ever been said or reported about that money. Why NOT? Where did it come from and where did it go?
This is the kind of thing they, government, want us to forget. No accountability anymore nor remorse. Simply, if they can get away with it, they take it “Okay” and thus a rationale to justify it and live with it. I say, rubbish! We need to pay attention people, they have no conscious!! Can’t we see that?
this is sickening and the public should revolt and revolution and hang the lot of them involved with this massive rip off wake up America what is wrong with you people????
And yet, McCaskill voted NO on the federal reserve vote….hmmmm. Simple rhetoric..smh
Last time the Pentagon was asked where so much money had gone missing was September 10, 2001…
Finally! Someone gets it!
Lion’s watching over the sheep, we need Bernie, like Obywon, he’s our only hope.
What if I had something bigger, and current?
With evidence.
And what if I said the one percent has a one percent within the 99 percent, essentially their buffers if anything ever becomes public?
And I found this out, only because my life has been ruined by one person, which led me to dig deeper in what I was missing in reasons as to why this person is ruining my life, and it only all connected when I googled cryptonography.
“Looks like it’s not a myth that the Pentagon has lost $850 TRILLION of taxpayer money”
Opening link and reading about ‘only’ $800 million…
What about the rest?
See? This is how the money disappears
When people are hired at high level to ‘keep an eye on things’ they are expected to understand that the eye referred to, and paid for, is the blind one.
The “HIT JOB” they put on Scott and his friends
By Andrew Weinstein
While most people may think that “hit-jobs” are the realm of Hollywood
movie plots, these kinds of corporate assassination attempts do take
place daily in big business and politics.
At the request of the U.S. Government, Scott developed and patented an
energy technology that affected trillions of dollars of oil company and
technology billionaire insider profits. He didn’t realize this at the
time. Now he wishes he had never gotten the call from Washington.
Let me make this point clearly: The control of Trillions of dollars of
energy industry profits were being fought over by two groups and the
Government plunked Scott down in the middle of that war. Scott had no
affiliation with either group. He thought he was just accepting a
challenge to help his nation.
He won commendation from the U.S. Congress in the Iraq War Bill, He won
federal patents, he won a Congressional grant, he won a huge number of
letters of acclaim and he won the wrath of a handful of insane
billionaires who could not compete with his technology.
The attacks were carried out by California State employees and U.S.
Government officials who had received payment from these billionaires.
Department of Energy Executives and their campaign billionaire handlers
engaged in these attacks in order to control the solar and “green car”
markets. The did not care about green issues, they only cared about
green cash.
Federal and state employees ran retribution campaigns against applicants
who competed with inside deals they had set up to line their own pockets
at taxpayer expense.
These corrupt politicians thought they could take over an estimated six
trillion dollar “Cleantech” industry that was being created to exploit
new marketing opportunities around global warming and middle east
disruption. After an epic number of Solyndra-esque failures, all owned
by the Department of Energy Executives and their campaign financiers,
the scheme fell apart. The non crony applicants suffered the worst
fates. As CBS News reporter Cheryl Attkisson has reported, the
willingness to engage in media “hitjobs” was only exceeded by the
audacity with which Department of Energy officials employed such tactics.
Now, in a number of notorious trials and email leaks, including the Hulk
Hogan lawsuit and the DNC and Panama Papers leaks, the public has gotten
to see the depths to which public officials are willing to stoop to
cheat rather than compete in the open market.
Department of Energy employees and State of California employees engaged
in the following documented attacks against applicants who were
competing with their billionaire backers personal stock holdings. Scott
and the other applicants including Bright Automotive, Aptera, Eco-Motors
and many more, suffered these attacks:
– Social Security, SSI, SDI, Disability and other earned benefits were
stone-walled. Applications were “lost”. Files in the application process
“disappeared”. Lois Lerner hard drive “incidents” took place.
– State and federal employees played an endless game of Catch-22 by
arbitrarily determining that deadlines had passed that they, the
government officials, had stonewalled and obfuscated applications for,
in order to force these deadlines that they set, to appear to be missed.
– Some applicants found themselves strangely poisoned, not unlike the
Alexander Litvenko case. Heavy metals and toxic materials were found
right after their work with the Department of Energy weapons and energy
facilities. Many wonder if these “targets” were intentionally exposed to
toxins in retribution for their testimony. The federal MSDS documents
clearly show that a number of these people were exposed to deadly
compounds and radiations without being provided with proper HazMat suits
which DOE officials knew were required.
– Applicants employers were called, and faxed, and ordered to fire
applicants from their places of employment, in the middle of the day,
with no notice, as a retribution tactic.
– Applicants HR and employment records, on recruiting and hiring
databases, were embedded with negative keywords in order to prevent them
from gaining future employment.
– One Gary D. Conley and one Rajeev Motwani, both whistle-blowers in
this matter, turned up dead under strange circumstances. They are not
alone in a series of bizarre deaths related to the DOE.
– Disability and VA complaint hearings and benefits were frozen,
delayed, denied or subjected to lost records and “missing hard drives”
as in the Lois Lerner case.
– Paypal and other on-line payments for on-line sales were delayed,
hidden, or re-directed in order to terminate income potential for
applicants who competed with DOE interests and holdings.
– DNS redirection, website spoofing which sent applicants websites to
dead ends and other Internet activity manipulations were conducted.
– Campaign finance dirty tricks contractors IN-Q-Tel, Think Progress,
Media Matters, Gawker Media, Syd Blumenthal, etc., were hired by DOE
Executives and their campaign financiers to attack applicants who
competed with DOE executives stocks and personal assets.
– Covert DOE partner: Google, transfered large sums of cash to dirty
tricks contractors and then manually locked the media portion of the
attacks into the top lines of the top pages of all Google searches
globally, for years, with hidden embedded codes in the links and
web-pages which multiplied the attacks on applicants by many magnitudes.
– Honeytraps and moles were employed by the attackers. In this tactic,
people who covertly worked for the attackers were employed to approach
the “target” in order to spy on and misdirect the subject.
– Mortgage and rental applications had red flags added to them in
databases to prevent the targets from getting homes or apartments.
– McCarthy-Era “Black-lists” were created and employed against
applicants who competed with DOE executives and their campaign
financiers to prevent them from funding and future employment.
– Targets were very carefully placed in a position of not being able to
get jobs, unemployment benefits, disability benefits or acquire any
possible sources of income. The retribution tactics were audacious,
overt..and quite illegal.
So, the next time you are asked to “Serve Your Country”, consider the
implications if you do a good job.
While law enforcement, regulators and journalists are now clamping down
on each, and every, one of the attackers, one-by-one, the process is
slow. The victims have been forced to turn to the filing of lawsuits in
order to seek justice.