What abuses canoccur under Bush’ssecret ‘robustfunding of theintelligencecommunity’?
Bush Administration Hides ‘Black Budget’By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 22nd, 2007The Bush Administration’s proposed 2008 defense budget reads as expected…until you get to the creative writing.There’s a section of the $715 billion budget for “defense” and the Iraq war which has no numbers, no zeroes, and hence no accountability. All citizens may read are a few sentences, such as: “Robust funding of the intelligence community.”This is the portion of the budget known as the “black budget.” It is filled with spending requests that few Americans will ever discover, and have only in recent years even heard about.Now it’s also become of interest to the FBI. According to the Las Vegas Sun, the Bureau is conducting a preliminary investigation into allegations that Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, when serving in Congress, took bribes from longtime friend Warren Trepp in exchange for securing Defense Department funds for Trepp’s s Reno-based company, eTreppid Technologies LLC.Questions about Gibbons’ possible congressional misdeeds date to Feb. 13th, 2004, when the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command announced that it had awarded a $30 million, five-year contract to Trepp’s corporation. The problem is that the contract apparently did not stem from an earmark.Gibbons claims he simply put Trepp in touch with Defense Department authorities, and that the corporation won the contract on its own merits. But Gibbons had in fact secured black budget funds for Trepp’s company, which include a $1.17 million boost to an existing 2005 contract, according to a Wall Street Journal report last fall.And Gibbons freely touted a $3 million earmark he secured for the company in a 2004 press release, even though there is no public record of such an earmark.Federal investigators are investigating whether Trepp’s gifts to Gibbons, including a 2005 cruise Trepp hosted for the congressman, his wife and others, were bribes for such friendly treatment. Trepp also contributed $90,000 to Gibbons’ gubernatorial campaign.As military spending has gobbled much of the Bush budget since the 9/11 attacks, the amount of dollars being funneled to the black budget has also risen sharply. The president’s $481 billion defense budget for fiscal 2008 is 60 percent higher than the one requested for 2001, not counting supplemental war spending. The black budget has also soared, tripling from 2001 levels.This year $45 billion will surge into the secret budget to pay for, among other things, secret weapons systems and some of the U.S. intelligence community’s 16 agencies, according to the Las Vegas Sun.What troubles defense analysts is not just the sheer size of a secret government budget. The classified spending has exploded in an era when Congress has all but given up its constitutional duty to act as a check on the executive branch. And Congress has not been checking itself, either.With so many dollars and so little oversight, the black budget quickly became an easy playground for political favors.The most infamous case is that of imprisoned former California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who took bribes from defense contractors in exchange for as much as $80 million in classified earmarks.”Its pretty basic stuff: Secrecy invites corruption,” Steven Aftergood, a veteran black budget expert who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told the Las Vegas Sun.”What Congressman Cunningham did should not have been possible. He was able to push through what amounted to personal favors in the national intelligence budget.”How many red flags do we need to understand the current system is broken?” Aftergood added.”This is an area where earmarking is fraught with peril,” said Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington watchdog group.”It’s one thing to take road money and steer it to the road that goes right in front of your house. It’s another thing to take money that’s supposed to make the country secure,” Ellis told the Sun.Cunningham’s bribe-taking should have been tagged by overseers on the House and Senate intelligence and defense committees, which review the black budget behind closed doors. But under the Republican-led majority, Congress did a poor job of policing itself, as demonstrated by a stream of scandals in recent years–which, by the way, also involved some Democrats.The practice of earmarking often topped the list of abuses. Earmarks allow individual lawmakers to quietly fund pet projects without undergoing the usual congressional scrutiny. Perhaps predictably, the number of earmarks has grown from 3,000 a year to 15,000 over the last decade.Black budget earmarks, like those Cunningham secured, are a double-whammy however. Unlike earmarks in the regular budget, which will in time be exposed, black budget earmarks are permanently secret.
