The mainstream media, specifically one of the nation’s largest newspapers, reported the China invasion months ago though the administration has refused to acknowledge the crisis. It’s been downright insulting considering the February article featured digital forensic evidence—confirmed by American intelligence officials—showing that a Chinese Army unit repeatedly hacked into the computer systems of government agencies as well as U.S. corporations.

Also quoted was a detailed study conducted by a reputable American computer security firm that tracked individual members of China’s most sophisticated hacking groups, a military unit known as Comment crew or Shanghai Group. Regardless, the Obama administration refused to acknowledge the connection and a frustrated U.S. intelligence official explains why: “There are huge diplomatic sensitivities here.” Could it be because the communist nation remains one of our biggest trading partners?

This week the Obama administration finally recognized that China and its People’s Liberation Army is in fact using cyber weapons against the U.S. The long overdue acknowledgement comes via the Pentagon’s Annual Report to Congress. It flat out says that in 2012 numerous computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, were targeted by “intrusions,” attributable directly to the Chinese government and military.

The information obtained by China could be used by the communist nation to “build a picture of U.S. network defense networks, logistics and related military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis,” according to the defense report. The Chinese also strive to steal industrial technology and obtain insight into American policy makers’ thinking, the report says.

It gets even scarier, if you believe the Pentagon assessment which includes a number of graphs and charts illustrating specific incidents. It reveals that China has a very sophisticated cyber technology system that ranks among the world’s finest. That’s because its goal is to blind American satellites and other space assets by investing in electronic warfare capabilities. Oh, and the Chinese also plan to use electronic weapons systems to eventually push the U.S. military presence in the mid-Pacific about 2,000 miles from China’s coast.

China’s many investments in the U.S. will help accomplish all this by reinforcing its military technology, the Pentagon reveals. “China continues to leverage foreign investments, commercial joint ventures, academic exchanges, the experience of repatriated Chinese students and researchers, and state-sponsored industrial and technical espionage to increase the level of technologies and expertise available to support military research, development and acquisition.”

So, what should the U.S. do to stop China from compromising our national security? That appears to be top secret because it’s not included in the Pentagon’s report to Congress.

This may seem inconceivable, but it’s not uncommon among many government agencies. In this case, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Pentagon, is the offender. A private firm hired to provide food and water to U.S. troops in Afghanistan “overbilled” taxpayers by $757 million and, rather than severing ties, the agency rewarded it with more business.

The deal, one of the largest U.S. military contracts in Afghanistan, involves a company named Supreme Foodservice GmbH that also provided the same services for British troops in the region. The original U.S. contract with Supreme exceeds $3 billion and dates back to 2005. This month a congressional hearing exposed how the company tried to cheat taxpayers by, among other things, improperly billing for a $58 million warehouse and by charging $12 million to deliver food just across the street from that facility!

At the hearing, before the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Subcommittee on National Security, the DOD Inspector General provided alarming figures that show agency officials failed to provide “sufficient oversight” of the monstrous contract. As a result, the Pentagon overpaid more than $750 million, including $98.4 million in transportation costs and $454.9 million to airlift fresh fruits and vegetables, according to the watchdog.  

A Florida congressman, John Mica, who sits on the oversight committee, offered this assessment during the hearing. “This has to be one of the prime poster childs for a government contract spun out of control.” The Pentagon’s watchdog made these recommendations, which seem like common sense though they’re obviously not being applied; obtain and maintain adequate documentation to support “price reasonableness,” take additional actions to obtain critical information from contractors and develop strategies to recover overpayments.

This is hardly the first time that the DOD has been under fire for wasting large sums of money. Just last fall a senate report blasted the Pentagon for spending around $70 billion on dubious projects unrelated to its mission. They include billions on research that has little or nothing to do with national defense or medical needs related to military service, including $5.2 billion study fish that overcome political polarization and $1.4 million to create beef jerky treats.

Who could forget the billions wasted in Iraq reconstruction efforts? Audit after audit has exposed how the DOD projects are rife with waste, fraud and abuse and that the spending is so out of control the government has lost track of a large portion of the money.  At last count at least $6 to $8 billion earmarked to rebuild Iraq by training local police, building schools, hospitals and transportation systems could not be accounted for.  

On the heels of that unbelievable revelation Americans learned that the Pentagon had somehow lost $475 million worth of oil destined for the Afghan National Army. It’s unlikely we will ever know how the oil vanished because the DOD improperly shredded records that could solve the mystery, according to federal auditors.

This isn’t something that’s been widely covered because most media lost interest after the last U.S. troops left Iraq in December of 2011. Nearly 5,000 U.S. service members died and more than 32,000 were wounded in the war—George W. Bush’s war—which lasted nearly nine years and cost north of $2 trillion, according to a recent study. The same study, released on the 10^th anniversary of the U.S. invasion, estimates that the cost could eventually top $6 trillion.

That extraordinary figure doesn’t even include reconstruction, but is rather limited to actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury during the war and future commitments such as the medical and disability claims of American veterans. An additional $60 billion has gone to post-war recovery, an ongoing initiative that has been plagued by scandal.

At least $8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds has been wasted because of contracting abuses and mismanagement, according to the final report released by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). The transitional watchdog has published hundreds of scathing reports over the years and this month released the grand finale, a painful 186-page exposé that includes many examples of the corruption that’s plagued U.S.-funded Iraq reconstruction efforts.

Here is how some of the money was spent; north of $15 billion went to projects that supposedly improved Iraq’s power and water supply, schools, and road and housing repairs. Around $9 billion went to health care, law enforcement and “humanitarian” assistance. Uncle Sam doled out $20 billion to re-equip Iraqi security forces and around $8 billion to enhance the rule of law and crackdown on narcotics. An additional $5 billion was blown on propping up Iraq’s economy.

So, what government agency is to blame for this atrocious multi-billion-dollar waste? The Department of Defense (DOD), according to the SIGIR. That’s because it practically controlled, or at least “held decisive sway” over 87% of the money. In short, the SIGIR writes in its last report that “the U.S. reconstruction program failed to meet its goals because of poor planning, indiscriminate priorities, and insufficient consultation with Iraqi authorities.”

Just last summer the SIGIR released an equally enraging audit estimating that at least $6 to $8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds had been lost to fraud and waste. Furthermore, that probe revealed that the precise amount lost can never be known because of poor record-keeping. A number of other audits have exposed the ongoing abuse of taxpayer dollars in Iraq reconstruction efforts. 

Congress appropriated a whopping $51.4 billion to help the country recover from the war by, among other things, training local police, building schools, hospitals and transportation systems, but much of the money has literally vanished. The funds were allocated to the DOD, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), though the DOD—especially the Army—has been the leader in handling the money.

Over the years probes have revealed that lucrative contracts never got finished, weapons and sophisticated communication equipment can’t be accounted for and that an unused police housing camp with an Olympic-sized pool and lavish trailers still sits empty in Iraq. A few years ago the Pentagon admitted that lost 6.6 billion in cash that had been flown into Iraq in turboprop military cargo planes for post-invasion reconstruction! The money was bundled in chunks of $100 bills with each aircraft carrying about $2.4 billion. The inspector general referred to it as “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

Like many other failed renewable energy experiments, the Navy project was funded with money from President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus, the fraud-infested disaster that was supposed to jump start the economy and put Americans back to work. Instead, big chunks of money have gone to wasteful projects, including green energy ventures like the northern California solar panel company (Solyndra) that folded after bilking taxpayers out of $535 million.

Part of the administration’s aggressive green initiative is to transform the way the military gets its power in the name of reducing global warming. More than $335 million in stimulus money has been allocated for renewable power projects at military bases, according to Pentagon figures quoted in a Virginia newspaper this week. The story focuses on a massive new solar energy project at the Norfolk Navy Base.

It cost American taxpayers $21 million, features more than 8,600 solar panels and spans 10 acres. Here comes the good part; the monstrous solar energy project, by far the largest in Virginia, can only generate about 2% of the electricity required to operate the Norfolk Navy base. Leave it to a government bureaucrat, the project manager for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, to point out the positive side: “You have to start somewhere,” the manager says in the article.

The same Naval station was blasted by the Pentagon Inspector General last year for its handling of $1 million in solar and lighting enhancements. The changes are supposed to save enough money via lower utility bills to make the investment worth it, but it will take nearly 4 ½ centuries for this particular experiment to pay off!  The IG audit focused on $117 million worth of renewable energy projects at the Department of Defense (DOD) that promised unacceptably low returns on investments.

Among them is a $14.1 million Air Force plan to build three wind turbines at radar stations in Alaska. The plan was pushed through without fully assessing the potential for wind at the turbine sites, the IG found. One turbine is already set to be eliminated due to “sporadic” wind at its location and the rest of the project it expected to take north of 15 years to pay off.

There seems to be no end in sight to this outrageous squandering of taxpayer dollars to make military bases more environmentally friendly. Just a few weeks ago a Senate report (“Department of Everything”) focusing on wasteful DOD projects revealed that the agency burned $700 million on “duplicative and unnecessary alternative energy” projects.

This is downright scary, considering that the country’s security essentially depends on DOD installations and facilities being in the right place.  It’s outlined on the massive agency’s website, which stresses that its job has never been more important as America fights terrorists who plan and carry out attacks on our facilities and our people.

The DOD is the nation’s largest employer with more than 1.4 million men and women on active duty and a civilian staff of 718,000. Another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and reserve forces. The DOD’s physical plant, the Pentagon, is one of the world’s largest office buildings. The Pentagon grounds consist of several hundred thousand structures, taking up more than 30 million acres of land.

It’s a monstrous and complicated operation by any standard but this is after all, the military compound of the world’s most powerful nation. This makes the audit, conducted by the DOD Inspector General, all the more alarming. In a 17-page report, the agency watchdog outlines the dangers of the DOD’s inept security policies. “In addition, the sheer volume of security policies that are not coordinated or integrated makes it difficult for those at the field level to ensure consistent and comprehensive policy implementation,” the IG writes. “The fragmentation and lack of top-down coordination of the security enterprise undermines the DOD mission and national security.”

What does this all mean? That the DOD has at least 43 different policies covering the functional areas of information security, industrial security, operations security, research and technology protection, personnel security, physical security, and special access programs. This has been going on for decades, the IG points out. The solution to the decades-long “fragmentation and incoherence” is the development of a “comprehensive and integrated security policy,” the audit says.

This may sound simple, but as the DOD watchdog discovered, the “redundancies and other inefficiencies” persist in most disciplines because there are no clearly defined responsibilities and lines of authority for information security, physical security and information assurance. This applies to areas such as critical infrastructure protection, nuclear physical security, cyber security, foreign disclosure and technology.

Without offering specifics, the report paints a rather frightening picture of the inner workings of the planet’s most commanding military. It wasn’t that long ago that a separate audit exposed the DOD for blowing $2.7 billion on faulty software that was supposed to help cut costs by updating antiquated financial ledgers. The existing system creates serious management weaknesses but it’s still being used because the agency can’t get its act together.

The DOD has also come under fire recently for disclosing to Hollywood filmmakers the identity of a SEAL Team Six commander who participated in the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. The atrocious breach was made public thanks to a Judicial Watch lawsuit that forced the DOD and CIA to each turn over more than 100 pages of records related to the scandal. Check them out here.

In fact, the government has lost track of a large portion of the money and a special watchdog assigned to keep track of the never-ending scandal, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), has published a series of scathing reports documenting the corruption over the years.

The SIGIR’s latest audit, made public this month, reveals that at least $6 to $8 billion, earmarked for Iraq reconstruction, has been lost to fraud and waste. In all, Congress appropriated a whopping $51.4 billion to help the country recover from the war by, among other things, training local police, building schools, hospitals and transportation systems, but much of the money has literally vanished.

The funds were allocated to the Department of Defense (DOD), the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Tens of billions of dollars have been spent so far and there seems to be no end in sight to the rampant abuse of taxpayer money. There have been lucrative contracts that never got finished, weapons and sophisticated communication equipment that can’t be accounted for and an unused police housing camp with an Olympic-sized pool and lavish trailers.

Last summer the Pentagon admitted that it lost 6.6 billion in cash that had been flown into Iraq in turboprop military cargo planes for post-invasion reconstruction! The money was bundled in chunks of $100 bills with each aircraft carrying about $2.4 billion. In all 21 flights made trips, transporting a total of $12 billion in American currency. More than half vanished however, and SIGIR Stuart Bowen confirmed it was “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

Bowen’s most recent report, the final forensic audit of Iraq reconstruction funds, reiterates that that billions of American taxpayer dollars are at risk of waste and misappropriations though the precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known because of poor record-keeping. However, Inspector General Bowen assures that its “significant,” to the tune of billions of dollars.  

At least some of the players have been punished. As of last month, the SIGIR has helped federal prosecutors convict 71 individuals for fraudulent activities involving Iraq reconstruction funds, including bribery, inflating invoices and bid rigging. At least a dozen others have been indicted but the damage has been done and the funds will likely never be recovered. This is what happens when a bloated government program has unlimited funding and no oversight.

Most Americans may not know it, but a Colorado unit of the U.S. National Guard and Jordan’s Armed Forces have a longtime and ongoing partnership to address all sorts of women’s issues. They do it through a variety of rather interesting activities outlined this month in the National Guard’s online news publication.

Since 2009 Jordan and The U.S. have joined forces to hold eight women’s engagement events, according to the story, which is written by an Air Force Major. The piece focuses on the latest, which was held this month. The event covered communication styles, deployment preparations, sexual assault prevention, balancing work and home life and overall challenges faced by women in the military.

Her Royal Highness Princess Aisha bint Al Hussein, Jordan’s defense, military, naval and air attaché attended the workshops along with a delegation of female JAG soldiers, including Jordan’s director of military women’s affairs. The story includes a picture of the women in military uniforms, the Jordanians sporting hijabs used by Muslim females to cover their head.

The women participated in “leadership and trust” activities at the U.S. Air Force Academy High Ropes course and trained on the Colorado Army National Guard’s Humvee Egress Assistance Trainer and Virtual Combat Operations Trainer. Then they bonded in a roundtable discussion on “women’s issues.” It was an excellent forum to share the challenges facing women in the world today, according to the Colorado Guard’s assistant adjutant general for the Army.

Terrorism remains a huge threat in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the State Department warns against traveling to the Middle Eastern country that it diplomatically describes as having “traditional Islamic ideals and beliefs” which “provide a conservative foundation for the country’s customs, laws and practices.” Travelers should be cognizant of the fact that al-Qaeda in Iraq affiliates have carried out terrorist activities against U.S. targets, the State Department warns.

A few years ago a major U.S. newspaper exposed how Jordan’s government shielded the country’s largest bank from several lawsuits involving funding terrorist operations. The civil suits, filed in New York federal court, accused Arab Bank PLC of knowingly routing compensation payments from Saudi donors to suicide bombers’ families and financing groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.    

Jordan took the rare step of filing a court brief backing Arab Bank’s refusal to disclose client records that could, either exonerate it or prove it did indeed support terrorism. The federal judge hearing the case determined that the missing documents would likely substantiate the plaintiffs’ claims and ruled that a jury would be free to infer, from the bank’s refusal to produce the records, that it knowingly provided financial services to terrorists.

The alarming revelation comes just days after lawyers for an al-Qaeda operative—USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri—jailed at the facility tried convincing a military judge that monitoring detainees’ mail violates attorney-client privilege. Judicial Watch covered the pretrial hearing at the U.S. Naval station in Cuba last week.

Ironically, a large portion of the two-day proceedings involved security measures put in place to ensure that contraband does not make it into the facility that houses 171 prisoners. Attorneys for al-Nashiri argued at length to convince the military tribunal judge hearing the case, Army Colonel James Pohl, that al-Nashiri’s mail not be monitored. The admiral (David Woods) who runs the prison took the stand to explain that detainees’ legal mail is promptly marked after being identified and not read to preserve attorney-client privilege.

This was not satisfactory to al-Nashiri’s extensive legal team or the leftwing civil rights groups that attended the hearing in a top security courtroom built to try terrorists. Most mainstream media outlets were also critical of the screening process, which military officials say is necessary to intercept contraband before it gets in the hands of the prisoners.

Supporting the argument is this week’s DOJ announcement that an agent with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been criminally charged for repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of covert agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of terrorists. Some of the materials were actually seized from the cells of Guantanamo detainees, according to the DOJ.  

The disgraced CIA officer (John Kiriakou) divulged the classified information to journalists who, in turn, disclosed it to an investigator working for the taxpayer-funded defense team of an incarcerated terrorist. Authorities subsequently found some of the files, including photographs of certain government employees and contractors, in the cells of high-value detainees at the military prison.