Talk about government accounting, am reading another thread about the NSA and its British counterpart...
“Behind the Zircon [brit spy satellite]scandal was deception. The government had previously been caught hiding weapons expenditure using false accounting. They then promised to report, in secret if needed, on any project costing more than £250 million (about $400 million). No sooner was this promise made than it was broken for GCHQ’s purposes. Operating Zircon would also have raised GCHQ’s costs by one third.”
I miss Robert Ludlum. Here’s the thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3320299/posts
Maybe this administration is NOT spending all that money on welfare and o-care?
We do have ‘black’ projects but I’m not sure how they get funded.
My dad told me about a time at the Pentagon when his boss, a general officer, told him to go see another general down the hall and ask him for a large sum of money. Dad said “What am I supposed to tell him?” His boss said “Nothing. He doesn’t have the right security clearance.”
So dad goes down the hall and does exactly what he was told. He comes back a short while later and his boss says “Well how did it go?” Dad says “Just like you’d expect it would go. I asked him for the money. He said ‘What for?’ I said ‘I can’t tell you, you don’t have the right clearance’ at which point he said ‘Get the hell out of my office!’
Evidently that’s not the way that secret programs, even small ones, normally get funded. No one in their right mind would hand over money without knowing where it was going.
I’ve tried over the years to get dad to tell me what programs he worked on. Keep in mind that these programs were 50 years ago. He always tells me “Nope. You don’t have the clearance”.