Stanley McChrystal

DoD Report Says McChrystal Profile Inaccurate, Rolling Stone Responds

Melissa Jeltsen | April 18, 2011, 4:34PM

General Stanley McChrystal

The award-winning Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal -- which portrayed the former top general in Afghanistan as having a loose tongue when it came to the Obama administration -- effectively ended his military career.

But the Department of Defense is still maintaining McChrystal and his staff, who were quoted in the article making disparaging comments about Obama administration officials, were not at fault. An Inspector General report released Monday after a Freedom of Information Act request has cleared the general and his staff of any wrongdoing.

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Commission On Wartime Contracting

Highway Robbery! U.S. Losing Hundreds of Millions To Rampant Afghan Fuel Theft

Susan Crabtree | March 3, 2011, 11:55AM

After nearly a decade of mismanagement, theft and fraud, the U.S. military still hasn't found a way to staunch the flow of what is likely hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of dollars in lost fuel in Afghanistan, some of which is sold on the black market and winds up in Taliban hands, a TPM investigation has found.

With political unrest in the Middle East sending oil over $100 per barrel and Congress more intent than ever at cutting government waste, fraud and abuse in tough budgetary times, the Defense Department is under intense pressure to find a way to monitor and track the flow of fuel in and out of its bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The extensive corruption associated with disappearing fuel in Afghanistan provides another illustration of the problems associated with the heavy use of private contractors on the battlefield. Earlier this week, the non-partisan Commission for Wartime Contracting reported that the U.S. government has spent $117 billion on private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, and tens of billions of those dollars have been wasted.

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U.S. Postal Service

Postal Employees Charge 'Adult Entertainment,' Plane Tickets For Family To Gov't Credit Card

Ryan J. Reilly | February 14, 2011, 9:46AM

One Postal Service employee used his government travel card at adult entertainment establishments more than 50 times. Another paid for an Apple computer and his mortgage. Three others purchased airfare tickets (including tickets to Spain and Italy) for family and friends.

That's all according to a Postal Service Inspector General report issued last week on non-compliance with travel policies. The travel cards are actually placed in the employees names, so it isn't clear whether the government paid for the expenditures in question. But regulations do clearly state that "employees may not use their official government travel card for personal business," according to the report.

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FBI

DOJ Report: FBI Employees Cheated On Skills Assessment Test

Ryan J. Reilly | September 27, 2010, 10:24AM

A significant number of FBI employees cheated on an exam intended to assess their skills on criminal investigations, national security investigations and foreign intelligence collection, according to a Justice Department Inspector General report released Monday.

When taking the computerized 51-question Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), some consulted with others while taking the exam, others used or distributed answers sheets or study guides that provided answers to the test and some employees "exploited a programming flaw to reveal the answers to the exam on their computers."

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Minerals Management Service

Probe Finds MMS Inspectors Got Free Peach Bowl Tickets, Looked At Porn

Justin Elliott | May 25, 2010, 1:02PM

Miami's Kyle Wright during the 2005 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl game against LSU

An inspector general report on the Lake Charles, LA, office of the Minerals Management Service found that inspectors accepted a free trip to the 2005 Peach Bowl paid for by an oil company.

The report (.pdf), released today in response to the Gulf Coast oil spill but not directly connected to it, also found "numerous instances of pornography and other inappropriate material on the e-mail accounts of 13 employees, six of whom have resigned. We specifically discovered 314 instances where the seven remaining employees received or forwarded pornographic images and links to Internet websites containing pornographic videos to other federal employees and individuals outside of the office using their government e-mail accounts."

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Defense Contractors

Pentagon Increasingly Pays Defense Contractors To Test Their Own Projects

Justin Elliott | December 10, 2009, 6:11PM

A Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV), part of the Future Combat System

In 2007, the Defense Department paid the same private companies working on the Army's modernization program to tell the DOD how the program was going, according to a not-yet-public inspector general report.

Politico got an early look at the IG report, which notes that, between 1987 and 2007, the DOD's use of contractors for testing and quality control increased by 375 percent. The report finds that the trend toward privatization began in the 1990s, and continued through the Bush years.

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