The Center for Public Integrity

In the central March 2008 negotiations over the delivery of weapons by Russian arms merchant Viktor Bout to a Columbian terrorist group, the key players were two men identified as Carlos and Ricardo. They cunningly presented themselves as representatives of FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a group known for kidnappings, drug smuggling, and access to lots of cash.

They did not hide their intentions. “We want to start … start killing American pilots,” Carlos bluntly told Bout, while asking for assault weapons, sniper rifles, and surface-to-air missiles.

As Bout abruptly learned when the deal-making sessions at the Bangkok Sofitel Hotel ended with his arrest, neither of the two men were actually with FARC. They were instead paid agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who once again had successfully posed as members of a group that has waged a brutal war against the Colombian government.

Lost in the attention surrounding Bout’s sentencing last week to a 25-year prison term is the fact that the DEA has conducted not just one major FARC-related sting, but at least four in the past six years alone. That they have successfully used the same strategy over and over again suggests one of two possibilities: Those in the drug trafficking and arms smuggling world are less well-informed and more careless than their pop-culture images suggest, or the DEA is particularly good at fooling its victims with the convincing patter of anti-imperialist revolutionaries bent on hobbling a U.S. ally.

A judge in New York sentenced arms dealer Victor Bout Thursday to 25 years in prison, permanently ending his run as perhaps the world’s most notorious weapons-dealing kingpin.
 
Bout was convicted on charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens, conspiracy to kill U.S. employees, conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.
 
U.S. agents posing as members of the FARC terrorist group captured him in Thailand during a 2008 sting operation. It took over two years for Bout, a Russian, to be extradited to stand trial in New York.
 
In 2002, the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published “The merchant of death,” a massive exposé on Bout’s activities throughout the world. For more, read the full series, Making a Killing, here.

Terrible medical care, long delays in service, and soldiers who felt like they were in a “petting zoo”: Those are just some of the issues identified in a Department of Defense Inspector General report issued March 30th on the Wounded Warrior Regiment.

Founded in 2007 as a way to help guide wounded Marines and sailors towards accepting and living with their injuries, the WWR has supported nearly 27,377 wounded, ill, and injured Marines. With camps throughout the country, WWR is among the leading groups in rehabbing both injured service members and their families.

But it has been seriously shortchanged by the Marines, according to the IG’s report. Both staff and service members undergoing treatment had a litany of complaints. Some beefed that they were forced to endure visits from VIPs, nonprofit groups and reporters looking for “visibly wounded” Marines with whom they could talk. One said he felt like he was in a “petting zoo.” Prescriptions were poorly monitored and frequently given in excessive quantities, creating a potential for drug misuse. The health care privacy act known as HIPPA was not respected at one location, causing medical information to be passed around loosely.

But the overarching problem highlighted in the report is the length of time it takes service members to be cleared to leave WWR facilities. At one location, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Warriors spent an average of 730 days — two full years — before being discharged. More than a fifth of the wounded service members at that location spent three years there, sometimes just waiting for paperwork to be processed. Some Marines had to wait three months for neurological exams, and then wait again to get a pain management appointment.

In 1995, U.S. spy satellites photographed telling moments in the massacre over four days of an estimated 7,800 Bosnians by Bosnian Serb forces near the town of Srebrenica. But these photographs were not publicized by U.S. officials until nearly four weeks after the massacre had ended.

Intelligence analysts did not circulate the evidence to senior officials for 22 days, even though two U.S. diplomats had picked up and circulated warnings about the killings on the first day and again 12 days later (“New Proof Offered of Serb Atrocities,” The Washington Post, Oct. 29. 1995, read an article excerpt on Highbeam).

It was an embarrassing disconnect between top policymakers and officials in the U.S. intelligence community, which jointly missed the chance to sound an alarm about a horrific, genocidal crime — the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II — while it was still under way.

In 2012, the public picture of what’s happening in Syria — where 9,000 people have been killed so far, according to the UN — literally looks different, due to an unusual agreement brokered by White House aides between the intelligence community and the State Department. For more than a month, U.S. intelligence analysts have been declassifying satellite photos depicting the movement of Syrian armor and the destruction of Syrian villages so the department’s Human Rights Bureau can plaster them on its website.

Want to know how much of your tax money is going to the military? Thanks to a new website from the federal government, now you can!

The White House “Federal Taxpayer Receipt” calculator, released Wednesday, asks you to put in how much you paid in taxes this year before spitting out a calculation of how much went to fund what programs. The largest chunk of your taxes goes to the military — 24.9% of tax income, in fact.

The calculator goes farther and breaks down how much of the tax money goes to specific programs within DOD. The (somewhat general) categories:

• Military personnel salaries and benefits — 5.8%
• Ongoing operations, equipment, and supplies — 10.3%
• Research, development, weapons, and construction — 7.9%
• Atomic energy defense activities — 0.7%
• Defense-related FBI activities and additional national defense — 0.2%

After defense, the largest cost is healthcare at 23.7%, followed by “Job and Family Security” (unemployment, housing insurance, etc) at 19.1%. The other categories are all in the low single digits, which only serves as a reminder just how much money the average taxpayer puts in to the defense apparatus of the country each year.

Let’s do some math. The average taxpayer brings in $49,000 a year, according to tax firm HRBlock. A reasonable income tax for that amount is $5,000. Here’s how your money would be spent:

Some stories are so grim that they depress the spirit, make one angry, and stick in the mind for days afterward. Such is the powerful and important tale of Shin In Geun, one of the few successful escapees from a North Korean gulag. He was unfortunate enough to be born inside one of that country’s prisons, called Camp 14, as the child of an arranged liason between two inmates. His father was imprisoned solely because the father’s brothers had fled to South Korea.

Life in the camp, according to my former Washington Post colleague Blaine Harden’s detailed and harrowing account, featured persistent hunger, regular torture, and forced attendance at brutal executions — some involving children. After his mother and brother spoke of escape, he followed camp rules and turned them in, then was taken to watch them be killed. His partner in the successful escape was electrocuted on the prison fence.

Somehow, Shin made his way to the United States and now works for an American human rights group based in California. Harden wrote a book about Shin’s astonishingly hard life that has just been released, called “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.” An excerpt from the book appeared recently in the Guardian. 

In Seoul last week President Obama announced a major new deal with Belgium, France and the Netherlands to reduce the amount of highly-enriched uranium used to create medical isotopes. Under the new deal, the three countries will soon start making isotopes only from low-enriched uranium — the much safer nuclear material that isn’t useful for terrorists or rogue nations looking for a quick way to damage a city by exploding a dangerous bomb.

In theory, the agreement will make the world a safer place. This assumes, of course, that the gains made in Seoul aren’t undercut by cheaper HEU-produced isotopes due to a joint Russian-Canadian agreement. Neither of those countries has agreed to the shift embraced by the Europeans.

Some isotopes are used in are scans for life-threatening conditions. About 50 percent of the scans are related to cardiac disease and 20 percent relate to cancer. When there have been isotope shortages, often caused by interference in the supply chain that travels the globe, doctors have shown a reluctance to perform tests or surgeries that might otherwise be routine.

Right now, America provides isotope producers with much of the HEU — a key component of a nuclear weapon — that they need to make the diagnostic tools used in numerous medical procedures around the globe. Nonproliferation experts have long pushed the major isotope generating facilities (located in South Africa, Australia, Canada, France, Belgium and the Netherlands) to use LEU — which is not suitable for nuclear bombs — instead. They argue that the technology is there for LEU-developed isotopes, and say that by limiting the movement of HEU around the globe they are minimizing the security risk it represents.

Beneath the oceans, on distant islands, in barren deserts, on icy hillsides, and at hundreds of other spots around the globe, special sensors are sniffing the air, measuring ground motion, watching for a particular kind of light, and listening for unique sounds. Their function is to pick up the telltale sign of a nuclear explosion, and according to a scientific report released in Washington on March 30, they can now do it very well.

The sensors, deployed at more than 260 sites under the supervision of an international organization based in Vienna, are singly or collectively able to discern the distinctive traits of such blasts anywhere in the world, down to a level of explosive force “well below” the equivalent of 1000 tons of TNT, or a fraction of the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, a panel of the National Research Council told the White House in its report.

U.S.-owned intelligence gear deployed around the globe and on satellites can do even better, the report said, without disclosing how much. Its overall message was that if the United States decides to join a global treaty banning nuclear tests — a goal professed by many U.S. officials since the treaty was completed in 1996 — it would not have to worry about militarily-significant, undetected cheating by others.

That conclusion is welcome news to the Obama administration, which has endorsed the treaty but opted not to press for its ratification this year because of Republican roadblocks. Acting Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller has repeatedly described this year as a good moment for skeptical, conservative lawmakers to learn more about the treaty, and the new, 204-page report by one of the country’s most respected scientific panels is meant to be their basic textbook.

Going strictly by the numbers, the DOD appears to be a model agency when it comes to avoiding what the government calls “improper payments” — those that should never have been made, or amount to more than was agreed in a contract. Despite their $687 billion budget, DOD has reported contributing relatively little to the government’s estimated $100 billion in improper payments in each of the last three years.

Government watchdogs have concluded that DOD’s reputation is undeserved, however. That’s because while other agencies count their entire budget when doing an assessment of improper payments, DOD has traditionally only counted internal expenditures, such as military salaries and benefits, and not external contract payments — a part of their budget that has skyrocketed in the post 9-11 world.  

Although legislation in 2010 ordered the Pentagon to give a more accurate tally, it hasn't done so yet, and appears unlikely to do so soon, according to testimony at a Senate hearing March 28. As a result, the Pentagon’s ongoing accounting challenges — rather than its sterling reputation — were a key topic at the hearing, held by the Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee on Federal Financial Management. 

The hearing was a rare bi-partisan effort on the Hill, with lawmakers from both parties expressing concern about the military’s audit problems.

Every agency, as it turns out, estimates its improper payments using a statistical sample, and reports the results at the end of the year. Some agencies show regular improvement in cutting down on their improper payments, a trend seen as evidence of improved accounting practices; others, not so much.

A costly and lengthy effort by the Pentagon to bring its financial ledgers up to modern standards continues to encounter serious problems, according to a new General Accountability Office report that spotlights shortcomings in accounting software now being tested by the Army and the Air Force.

The software, developed at a pricetag of $2.665 billion since 2003, was meant to streamline archaic, hand-written ledger accounting practices and enable the services to meet a 2017 legal deadline for producing their first, auditable financial statements. But the GAO's report, released on March 29, cites a series of weaknesses that have produced inaccurate data, “an inability to generate auditable financial reports, and the need for manual workarounds.”

The GAO based its assessment on its own research as well as internal Army and Air Force reviews that it said had confirmed problems existed in “data quality, data conversion, system interfaces, and training.” The troubles were evident in trials that so far involve only a fraction of the estimated 529,000 Army and Air Force employees that are slated to use the software while monitoring $471 billion worth of spending or inventory every year.

The aim of upgrading to modern software was partly to save money, since the Pentagon’s legacy accounting systems are  numerous — there are 2,258 of them — and frequently incompatible. By all accounts, they cannot produce a clear picture of where and how all that money is being spent.

But the dream of increased efficiencies is looking like just that, as two-thirds of the Army’s financial data still needs to be entered manually into the software, according to the GAO, and specialists have been forced to cut and paste data into spreadsheets and other software so they can create needed reports.