Appendix To The Announcement Of Department Of Business Development: Fill & Download for Free

The simple truth is, I’ve created I’ve created lots of estimates that were accurate. Management then announced a delivery date that trimmed hundreds, sometimes thousands of man hours from the project.I’ve seen people negotiate an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) only to have management use that hour estimate for the delivery of everything they originally asked for.Yes, we are optimistic. Yes, things come up. When management asks developers to come up with estimates for tasks, management is supposed to pad those numbers by at least 20%. Today they cut them by 40% or more and tell you to get it done then.This random-stake-in-the-ground management approach gets much harder for management to do when you are using Software Engineering.They have already signed off on The Four Holy Documents. There is no single manager who can just change the numbers. There is no single manager who can veto the project for cost. The System Architecture Document already identified any new software licensing, hardware & storage upgrades, etc. There are no big ticket surprises to get buy-in from the heads of customer departments. There will be at least one appendix in the SRD (System Requirements Document) which identifies the actual costs of any and all similar projects.By the time IT management gives the department the go-ahead to create what many call the Functional Specification, they and the company have committed to the path. You already have a list of any known-unknowns and have allowed for them.Short of something like the vendor of a critical tool going out of business or upper management going to prison for Enron (or greater) level accounting fraud, the project is going forward.I’m pointing this part out because so few working in IT are exposed to it anymore.What I see happening at many client (and and some I refuse to work at) sites is they try to use some form of AGILE. They don’t create The Four Holy Documents up front. There is no System Architecture Document or big picture for developers to work from. Someone decides to use a pure OOP solution for data storage (serializing objects to disk) to complete their user story in record time.Months later someone else gets a user story requiring them to generate a report from said data. Had the first developer placed everything in tables in a relational database a simple SQL statement would have gotten all the data sorted in the order needed for the report. Half a day to make it pretty, tops. This is the estimate given. Then they start on the project and learn it is going to take at least three days to unhose what previous developer hosed. That is just for the current in-house test and development systems. Someone else has to come up with something to unhose all of the units in the field.When I see things like the above happen it is always in a medical or other device where there are legal/contractual/regulator requirements for keeping results a certain length of time. Wipe it and start over is not an option.

The forerunner of the United Nations was the League of Nations, an organization conceived in similar circumstances during the first World War, and established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles "to promote international cooperation and to achieve peace and security.” This directly linked to it dismissal and creation of the United Nations during WW2 draws a gruesome picture of the bloody terror in Palestine that began simultaneously with the UN mandate.During the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 before recognition of the partition of Palestine in 1948 Dr. Chaim Weizmann whom was the first President of Israel had declared, "The Bible is our mandate", and the words which sounded good to Western ears was used to protray some series of events similar through Talmudic practice.This following event showed what they meant, and the same words were repeated by the Zionist leaders in Palestine thirty years after Dr. Weizmann used them.(The massacre at Deir Yasin was an act of "observance" of the ancient "statutes and commandments", including the relevant passage in Deuteronomy)"When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out. . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou. . . then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them","thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them".There are seven Arab states today, and each of them has its share of the fugitives of 1948, who for years have been a living reminder to them of the common future fate with which Zionism threatens them under the ancient Law.Dr. Weizmann then had called "the terror in Palestine" the "old evil in a new and horrible guise".April 9, 1948 showed what he meant, and in particular why he called it the old evil. On that day the "activists", the terror-and-assassination group of Zionism, "utterly destroyed" an Arab village in exact and literal fulfilment of "the Law" laid down in Deuteronomy (which, will be recall as the basic Judaic law but was itself an amendment of the original Mosaic law of the Israelites).This was the most significant day in the entire story of Zionism. To the Arabs (who knew the Torah and "had known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn") it meant that the savage Law of Judah, devised by the Levites between 700 and 400 BC, was to be resurrected and imposed on them in full force and violence.The symbolic massacre, they knew, was intended to show what would happen to all of them if they stayed. Thereon almost the entire Arab population of Palestine fled into the neighbouring Arab states.The massacre at Deir Yasin was briefly reported in the West, for instance Time Magazine of New York said:"Jewish terrorists of the Stern Gang and Irgun Zvai Leumi stormed the village of Deir Yasin and butchered everyone in sight. The corpses of 250 Arabs, mostly women and small children, were later found tossed into wells".The passive condonation of this deed by Jewry as a whole showed more clearly than anything else the change which Zionism had wrought in the Jewish mind in a few years. Writing in 1933 (only fifteen years before Deir Yasin), Mr. Bernard J. Brown quoted the above passage from Deuteronomy as the reason for Arab fears, and added,"Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modern Jew does not take his bible literally, and that he is a kind and charitable person and would not be so cruel to his fellow-man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of the historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it".The Arabs were right and Mr. Brown was wrong; this enlightened Western Jew could not conceive, in 1933, that Zionism meant a full return to the superstition of antiquity in its most barbaric form. Probably Deir Yasin remained an isolated incident only because its meaning was so clear that the Arabs left the country. The cause and effect was definite and the Arab civilian population after Deir Yasin, at once fled from Haifa, Tiberia, Jaffa and all other cities and then from the entire country, so that "by May 14 1948 all had gone save for a few thousand".All impartial authorities agree about the intention and effect of Deir Yasin, and from April 9, 1948 no doubt remained about the governing force of the ancient Judaic Law on all future acts and ambitions of Zion. Deir Yasin explains the fear of the surviving Arab states as fully as it explains the flight of the Palestinian Arabs.Deir Yasin, for a little while, solved the Zionists' problem. The partition of Palestine had been achieved, by force. At the same time the event revealed (to the Arabs, if not then to the West) the nature of Dr. Weizmann's "abyss into which terrorism was born.Thus the situation changed completely between March 19, 1948, when the American Government decided that partition was "unworkable" and reversed its policy. Dr. Weizmann must still have been haunted by his fears, but now that the territory for the Jewish state had been cleared he would not or could not withdraw from "the abyss". The aim now was to achieve a second reversal of American policy, to gain an expression of approval for what had been done by terrorism, and to this end, once more, Dr. Weizmann bent all his efforts.At the first reversal of American policy he had been urgently summoned from London to Lake success by letters, cables and telephone calls, and the day before it was announced he was again closeted with President Truman. As the days passed, and the news from Deir Yasin flickered, he laboured tirelessly at his supreme task the winning of "recognition" for the Jewish State set up by the terrorists at Deir Yasin.Dr Weizmann's energy was extraordinary. He conducted a one-man siege of the entire "United Nations" (of course, he was everywhere received as the representative of a new kind of world-power). He was "in close contact", for instance, with the delegates of Uruguay and Guatemala, whom he calls "the ever gallant defenders" of Zionism, and with the Secretary General of the United Nations.In mid-April, the General Assembly of the United Nations met. The American vote was clearly to be decisive, and Dr. Weizmann remarks that he "began to be preoccupied with the idea of American recognition of the Jewish state". In other words, American state policy, formed in the constitutional process of consultation between the Chief Executive and his responsible Cabinet officers, was once more to be reversed at the demand of Chaim Weizmann.On May 13, 1948 Dr. Weizmann saw President Truman; the contest for the presidential nominations then lay immediately ahead and the presidential elections a few months beyond, so that this was the ideal moment to apply "irresistible pressure". Dr. Weizmann informed President Truman that the British mandate would end on May 15, and a provisional government would then take over "the Jewish state". He urged that the United States "promptly" recognize it and the President acted with zealous alacrity.On May 14 (Palestine time) the Zionists in Tel Aviv proclaimed their new state. A few minutes later "unofficial news" reached Lake Success that President Truman had recognized it. The American delegates (who had not been informed "were incredulous", but "after much confusion" they made contact with the White House and received from it Dr. Weizmann's instructions, transmitted through the president.Dr. Weizmann forthwith repaired to Washington as the President of the new state and president Truman received his guest, thereafter announcing that the moment of recognition was "the proudest of my life". President Truman in his memoirs depicted the circumstances in which his "proudest moment" came about, and his account may appropriately be cited here.Describing the six-month period (from the "partition-vote" in November 1947 to "recognition" in April 1948), he says: "Dr. Chaim Weizmann called on me on November 19 and a few days later I received a letter from him". Mr Truman then quotes the letter, dated November 27; In it, Dr Weizmann refers to "rumours" that "our people have exerted undue and excessive pressure on certain" (United Nations) "delegations" and speaking for himself, says "there is no substance in this charge". Mr. Truman comments."The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White house, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance.The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats disturbed me and annoyed me. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly."The "political threats" mentioned here obviously related to president Truman's approaching re-election campaign; this is the only reasonable interpretation of the words. Mr. Truman (according to Dr. Weizmann) promised at the interview on November 19, "to communicate at once with the American delegation" and the United States vote was then given, on November 29, to the "recommendation" that Palestine be partitioned.Thus President Truman's anger (as recorded in his narrative of 1956) at the methods used in no wise delayed his capitulation to them in 1947 Mr. Truman (in 1956) recorded the outcome of the "solution" (the partition recommendation) supported by him in November 1947; "every day now brought reports of new violence in the Holy Land". He also found that his capitulation of November and Dr. Weizmann's disclaimer had no effect at all in the months that followed:"The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the United Nations. Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that and the other(Disraeli's picture of "the world being governed by very different persons from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes")The President sought refuge in retreat:"As the pressure mounted, I found it necessary to give instructions that I did not want to be approached by anymore spokesman for the extreme Zionist cause. I was even so disturbed that I put off seeing Dr. Weizmann, who had returned to the United States and had asked for an interview with me".Mr Truman, in 1956, evidently still held the postponement of an interview with Dr. Weizmann to have been so drastic a measure as to deserve permanent record. He was then visited (March 13, 1948) by an old Jewish business associate "who was claimed to be deeply moved by the sufferings of the Jewish people abroad" (this was less than a month before the massacre at Deir Yasin) and who implored him to receive Dr. Weizmann, which President Truman at once did (March 18).This was the day before American support was withdrawn from the partition recommendation (March 19). Mr. Truman says that when Dr. Weizmann left him (on March 18) "I felt he had reached a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted".Mr. Truman then passes over the bloody weeks that followed without a word (he does not mention Deir Yasin). He resumes his narrative two months later (May 14, after Deir Yasin and the accompanying bloodshed) then saying,"Partition was not taking place in exactly the peaceful manner I had hoped, but the fact was that the Jews were controlling the area in which their people lived."Now that the Jews were ready to proclaim the State of Israel I decided to move at once and give American recognition to the new nation."About thirty minutes later, exactly eleven minutes after Israel had been proclaimed a state, Charlie Ross, my press secretary, handed the press the announcement of the de facto recognition by the United States of the provisional government of Israel. I was told that to some of the career men of the State Department this announcement came as a surprise".Truman was elected president six months after his proudest moment. After president Truman's proud recognition of what had been done in Palestine between November 1947 and May 1948 the debate at the "United Nations" lost importance and Dr. Weizmann set to work to muster other recognitions, so that the issue should be put beyond doubt.Historically regarded, this was the moment of the first importance, because then, it showed for the first time that Zionism, which had so deeply divided Jewry, had divided the nations of the British Empire, or Commonwealth; what no warlike menace or danger had ever achieved, "irresistible pressure on international politics" smoothly accomplished. Suddenly Zion was shown to be supreme in capitals as far from the central scene as Ottawa, Canberra, Cape Town and WellingtonThis gave proof of superb staffwork and synchronization; miracles of secret organization must have been performed in a few decades to ensure the obedience, at the decisive moment, of the "top-line politicians" in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. These countries were remote from Palestine; they had no interest in implanting the fuse of new world war in the Middle East; their Jewish populations were tiny. Yet submission was instantaneous.This means that even the Zionist state set up after the Second World War by no means fulfills the intention of those who made the Balfour Declaration, and that further conquests of Arab lands have yet to be made by war.So much for the birth of “Israel” and the pains it caused to others. No offspring of political illegitimacy was ever ushered into the world by so many sponsors; the “recognitions” poured in and the peacemakers were everywhere discomfited. Within a few weeks the new state took another step towards “the abyss” of “the old evil”. The “United Nations”, having accepted the accomplished bisection of Europe and recommended the bisection of Palestine, showed a tardy concern for “peace” and appealed to Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to go to Palestine and mediate between the parties.Count Bernadotte had always given himself to the mitigation of human suffering, particularly to the relief and rescue of Jewish victims during the Second War. He worked in the sign of the Cross (the red one) and was killed at the very place where the Cross first became a symbol of faith and hope. No deed can be more atrocious than the murder of an accepted peacemaker and mediator by one of the combatant parties, and within four months of its creation the Zionist state added this second symbolic act to its calendar.Count Bernadotte kept a diary, published after his death. This records that, after accepting the mission of peace, he passed through London and was visited by Dr. Nahum Goldman, then vice-president of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist state’s representative, who told him that:“The state of Israel was now in a position to take full and complete responsibility for the acts committed by the Stern Gang and the members of Irgun”.These were the killer groups whose deed at Deir Yasin effected the clearance of territory for the Zionists and was implicitly “recognized” by the West. They were the “activists” against whom Dr. Weizmann had uttered warning at the Zionist Congress of 1946. Deir Yasin had shown that they had the power, by calculated acts of terrorism, to change the whole course of world affairs, irrespective of anything said by Zionist leaders, by politicians in the West, or by the “United Nations”.Up to the time when Dr. Nahum Goldman made the above-quoted statement to Count Bernadotte a pretence had been kept up that they were beyond the control of the “responsible” Zionist leaders, who deplored their acts. Dr. Goldman’s assurance was presumably meant to convince Count Bernadotte that his work of mediation would not be wantonly destroyed by any such act as that of Deir Yasin.The terrorists then murdered Count Bernadotte himself, and in the sequel (as will be shown) the Israeli government took responsibility for them and their deeds.Count Bernadotte, after hearing these reassuring words, set out to pacify. In Egypt he saw the Prime Minister, Nokrashi Pasha, who said“he recognized the extent of Jewish economic power, since it controlled the economic system of many countries, including the United States, England, France, Egypt itself and perhaps even Sweden”(Count Bernadotte did not demur to the last statement).Nokrashi Pasha said the Arabs did not expect to escape that domination! However, for the Jews to achieve economic domination of the whole of Palestine was one thing; what the Arabs would not accept, and would resist, was the attempt by force and terrorism, and with the assistance of international Zionism, to set up a Zionist state based on coercion.After this King Farouk told Count Bernadotte that if the war continued (it has not yet ended) it would develop into a third world war; Count Bernadotte agreed and said he had for that reason accepted the task of Mediator.He also mentioned that in the war he had had “the privilege of rescuing about 20,000 persons, many of them Jews; I myself had been in charge of this work”. He evidently thought this would qualify him for Zionist respect, and was wrong. Within a few days he had persuaded the Arabs (on June 9, 1948) to agree unconditionally to a cease-fire, but then read a fanatical Zionist attack on himself for “having forced the truce on the Jews”.“I began to realize what an exposed position I was in. . . the friendliness towards me would unquestionably turn to suspicion and illwill if, in my later activities as Mediator, I failed to study primarily the interest of the Jewish party but sought to find an impartial and just solution of the problem”.Irgun (for which the Zionist government through Dr. Goldman in London had claimed “full and complete responsibility”) then broke the truce (June 18-30, 1948) by landing men and arms. Count Bernadotte and his observers “were unable to judge the number of Irgun men landed or the quantity of war material unloaded” because the Zionist government refused to allow them near the spot.In the first week of July “the Jewish press made very violent attacks on me”. The defamationist method was now employed and Count Bernadotte’s efforts to rescue Jewish victims during the war were turned against him; the insinuation was made that his negotiations with the Nazi Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler, towards the war’s end about the liberation of Jews had been of dubious character, (the innuendo was that Count Bernadotte was “a Nazi”)Between July 19 and August 12 he had to tell Dr. Joseph, then Zionist military governor of Jerusalem, that according to his observers’ reports “the Jews were the most aggressive party in Jerusalem”. On September 16, on the historic peacemaker’s path “to Jerusalem” (the title of his book) Count Bernadotte in effect wrote his own death warrant; on that day he sent his “Progress Report” as Mediator from Rhodes to the United Nations, and within twenty-four hours he was murdered.The reason lay in his proposals. He accepted the “de facto” establishment of the Zionist state but, building on that basis, sought to reconcile and pacify by impartial proposals, as just to each party as the accomplished fact would allow. His chief concern was for the civilian Arab population, driven by the pogrom at Deir Yasin from its native villages and huddled beyond the frontiers. Nothing like this had ever been done under the wing of the West, and Count Bernadotte was fresh from efforts to rescue Jews from Hitler. Thus he proposed:That the boundaries of the Zionist state should be those envisaged in the “recommendation” of the United Nations on November 29, 1947, the Negev to remain Arab territory and the United Nations to ensure that these boundaries were “respected and maintained”;That (as also 'recommended') Jerusalem be internationalized under United Nations control;That the United Nations should “affirm and give effect to” the right of the Arab fugitives to return to their homes.Having dispatched these proposals on September 1, 1948, Count Bernadotte, before they could reach New York, flew to Jerusalem (September 17). He and his party, unarmed and defenceless, drove towards Government House when their car was halted by a Zionist jeep pulled across the road. Their movements were clearly as well known as the contents of Count Bernadotte’s report; three men jumped from the jeep, ran to his car, and with sten guns killed him and his Chief Observer in Jerusalem, the French Colonel Serot.The survivors, in an appendix to his diary, describe the killing in detail. Their accounts show its efficient preparation and execution and plainly point to the identity of the chief organizer. The actual murderers escaped without hindrance, two in the jeep and one across country. None was arrested or charged (report, probably credible, says that a waiting aeroplane removed the murderers to communized Czechoslovakia). The subsequent Israeli enquiry stated that:The murder as it was actually carried out and all the preparations that went with it are predicated on the following points:A clear decision to assassinate Count Bernadotte and the elaboration of a detailed plan for its carrying out;A complex spy network capable of keeping track of the Count’s movements during the time of his stay in Jerusalem so as to enable those responsible for the operation to fix its place and time;Men experienced in this kind of activities or who had received in good time training for it;Appropriate arms and methods of communication as well as safe refuge after the murder;A commander well experienced and responsible for the actual penetration.For such men the new state had declared itself “fully responsible”. Three days later a French news agency received a letter expressing regret that Colonel Serot had been killed in mistake for the Mediator’s Chief-of-Staff, the Swedish General Lundström, he being “an anti-Semite” (General Lundström was in another seat of the car). This letter was signed “Hazit Moledeth”; the Israeli police report stated that this was the name of the secret terrorist group within the Stern Gang.General Lundström announced (September 18) that:“These deliberate murders of two high international officials constitute a breach of the truce of the utmost gravity and a black page in Palestine’s history for which the United Nations will demand a full accounting”.No such demand was to be expected from the United Nations which (as this account has been shown) responds only to the strongest pressure exerted behind the scenes. It has (or then had; none can say what wondrous transformation the future might bring) no morality of its own; it was an oracle, worked by a hidden mechanism, and it did not trouble itself about the murder of its Mediator.It ignored the Mediator’s proposals; the Zionists took and kept what territory they then wanted, including the Negev, refused to let the Arabs return, and proclaimed that they would not allow Jerusalem to be internationalized (they are implacable in these points today.The world-newspapers brought out the editorial which they seemed to keep in standing-type for such occasions (“Incalculable harm has been done to the Zionist cause”) and then resumed their daily denunciations of any who pleaded the Arab case as “anti-Semites”. The Times of London even blamed Count Bernadotte for his own murder; it said the proposal to internationalize Jerusalem “undoubtedly incited certain Jews to kill Count Bernadotte”, and in the common understanding the word “incite” imputes blame.In Israel four months later two Stern Group leaders named Yellin and Shmuelevitz were sentenced to eight and five years imprisonment in this connection by a special court, the president of which, in reading that judgment, said there was “no proof that the order to kill Count Bernadotte had been given by the leadership”. The two men (according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency) “scarcely paid heed to the proceedings in view of the fact that the State Council was expected to approve a general amnesty”, and within a few hours of their sentencing they were released, then being escorted in triumph to a popular reception.The “Commander-in-Chief” of Irgun, a Mr. Menachem Begin, some years later made “a triumphal tour” of Western cities, being received in Montreal, for instance, by “a guard of honour of the Montreal police headed by Rabbis bearing Scrolls of the Law” (the South African Jewish Herald).Speaking at Tel Aviv during an election campaign in 1950 Mr. Begin claimed credit for the foundation of the Zionist state, through the deed at Deir Yasin. He said the Irgun had “occupied Jaffa”, which the government party “had been ready to hand over to the Arabs”, and added:“The other part of the Irgun’s contribution was Deir Yasin, which has caused the Arabs to leave the country and make room for the newcomers. Without Deir Yasin and the subsequent Arab rout, the present government could not absorb one-tenth of the immigrants”.Throughout the ensuing years, Mr. Begin continued to make sanguinary threats against the neighboring Arab states to whom the presence of the Palestinian Arabs within their borders was a constant reminder of Deir Yasin and of the dire meaning of his menaces. For five years the public presence was maintained that “the terrorists” had acted without authority at Deir Yasin and then, in April 1953, four Irgun men wounded at Deir Yasin claimed compensation.The Israeli government, through its Ministry of Security, denied the claim on the ground that the attack was “unauthorized”, whereon the Irgun commander produced a letter from the official Zionist military headquarters in Jerusalem authorizing the action. By that time the signatory was Israeli Minister of Brazil.This brings the story nearly down to our present day. When the revolution spread outward into the area abandoned to it by the West in 1945 the history of 1917-1918 in Russia was repeated. A Talmudic vengeance was wreaked and Jewish governments were with obvious intent set up everywhere. There was no great change in that state of affairs, either real or apparent, for years. What was done reaffirmed once more the nature of the revolution and of its directing force and Talmudic purpose.The revolution, having spread into the half of Europe held clear for it by the Western Allies, did one more thing: in the manner of a serpent striking, it thrust out a tongue that reached to the southern shores of Europe, across the Mediterranean and into the tiny land of Palestine.The money, equipment, escort and convoy were provided by the West, but the revolution supplied the two indispensable constituents of the Zionist State: the people to invade it and the arms which made its conquest certain. The West connived, but the Zionist state in the last analysis was the creation of the revolution, which in this manner fulfilled the Levitical doctrine of "the return".These incursions into Europe and into Arabia were the sole "territorial gains" reaped from the Second War, in the early stages of which the Western "premier-dictators" for a second time had publicly renounced all thought of territorial gain. The result of these two developments was to leave, in bisected Europe and bisected Palestine, two permanent detonation points of pandemonium and the latter presently on-going in the region which could be set off on a larger scale at any given moment.It will be recalled that in the years preceding the Second War, Zionism was in collapse in Palestine; and that the British Parliament in 1939, having been forced by twenty years of experience to realize that the "Jewish National Home" was impossible to realize, had decided to abandon the unworkable "Mandate" and to withdraw after ensuring the parliamentary representation of all parties in the land, Arab, Jews and others.The change which came about when Mr. Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940 and privately informed Dr. Weizmann (according to Weizmann's account, which has not been challenged) that he "quite agreed" with the Zionist ambition "after the war- to build up a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine".If Mr. Churchill, as stated by Dr. Weizmann, had agreed to the building up "of a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine", he must have known that the Zionists had a much larger quarrel with the population of Arabia.The Arab world even offered Israel a full peace treaty and normal relations. All Israel had to do was comply with UN Sec. Council Resolution 242 and not even that as the Palestinians would have allowed several large settlements on the West Bank to stay. Israel could have lived in peace on the 78% of Palestine that it stole and the US could have been hailed as a peacemaker by the entire Arab world. But Israel, US Jews and Christain wanted more so Bush was called on to invade and bully Israel's neighbors to force them to make a "peace" suitable to Israel.In fact, all the fighting, all the bloodshed in the Middle East since 1967, occurred because US/Israel has refused to leave just 22 percent of Palestine to its original inhabitants. They want it all. This Israeli government, and the American Jewish and Christian nutcakes who created it and support it, don't give a damn about peace or about Jews unless it’s necessary for any agenda use or gain. (Through history of that time frame, you’ll notice that Jews were among the tormentors, as well as among the victims. This kind of system is psychologically effective to avoid pointing finger to the party suspected of the culprit).Does anyone actually believe that peace will come about by attacking every Arab country and installing puppet governments -- turning the entire Arab world into one big West Bank? Will this make Israel, the US or any Jew on Earth more secure?You'll understand that the territory being claimed by the Turko-Mongolian Talmudist 'Jews', do NOT stop with the 'Greater Israel'. The WORLD is their doll house, and they mean it!

The Air Force would put perfectly good ovens on the loading dock then they would buy new ones that were not as good as the older ones!The logic was if we don’t spend our alotment we will not get it next year!The comuter components they threw away were in full sized dumpsters!Mean while back at the ranch one in six children in the UNITED STATES go to bed hungry.24 VETERANS COMMIT SUICIDE EVERY DAY ,40,000 VETERANS ARE HOMELES!US WARS AND MILITARY ACTIONDEFENSE SPENDINGFEATUREJANUARY 7, 2019, ISSUEExclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud ExposedHow US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.By Dave LindorffNOVEMBER 27, 2018fbtwmailPrintIllustration by Victor Juhasz.Ready To Fight Back?Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial.” The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock.As Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a frequent critic of the DoD’s financial practices, said on the Senate floor in September 2017, the Pentagon’s long-standing failure to conduct a proper audit reflects “twenty-six years of hard-core foot-dragging” on the part of the DoD, where “internal resistance to auditing the books runs deep.” In 1990, Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required all departments and agencies of the federal government to develop auditable accounting systems and submit to annual audits. Since then, every department and agency has come into compliance—except the Pentagon.ADVERTISINGYOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORKTHE PENTAGON SENT $500 MILLION ABROAD FOR INTERNATIONAL DRUG WARS. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS A MYSTERY.Nick TurseMEET THE NEW, SUPER-EXPENSIVE STEALTH BOMBER THE US DOESN’T NEEDWilliam J. AstoreA GUIDE TO TRUMP’S $1 TRILLION DEFENSE BILLWilliam D. HartungNow, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year, according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.“If the DOD were being honest, they would go to Congress and say, ‘All these proposed budgets we’ve been presenting to you are a bunch of garbage,’ ” said Jack Armstrong, who spent more than five years in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General as a supervisory director of audits before retiring in 2011.The fraud works like this. When the DoD submits its annual budget requests to Congress, it sends along the prior year’s financial reports, which contain fabricated numbers. The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the DoD does not always spend all of the money Congress allocates in a given year. However, instead of returning such unspent funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon sometimes launders and shifts such moneys to other parts of the DoD’s budget.Veteran Pentagon staffers say that this practice violates Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution, which stipulates thatNo Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.CURRENT ISSUEView our current issueSubscribe today and Save up to $129.Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon.The plugs can be staggering in size. In fiscal year 2015, for example, Congress appropriated $122 billion for the US Army. Yet DoD financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs. Most of these plugs “lack[ed] supporting documentation,” in the bland phrasing of the department’s internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General. In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.SUPPORT PROGRESSIVE JOURNALISMIf you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nation’s work.In this way, the DoD propels US military spending higher year after year, even when the country is not fighting any major wars, says Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, a former Pentagon whistle-blower. Spinney’s revelations to Congress and the news media about wildly inflated Pentagon spending helped spark public outrage in the 1980s. “They’re making up the numbers and then just asking for more money each year,” Spinney told The Nation. The funds the Pentagon has been amassing over the years through its bogus bookkeeping maneuvers “could easily be as much as $100 billion,” Spinney estimated.THE DOD'S MANUFACTURED CONSENTTHE PENTAGON WANTS YOU TO GO SHOPPING WHILE THE EXPERTS GO TO WARWilliam J. AstoreIndeed, Congress appropriated a record amount—$716 billion—for the DoD in the current fiscal year of 2019. That was up $24 billion from fiscal year 2018’s $692 billion, which itself was up $6 billion from fiscal year 2017’s $686 billion. Such largesse is what drives US military spending higher than the next ten highest-spending countries combined, added Spinney. Meanwhile, the closest thing to a full-scale war the United States is currently fighting is in Afghanistan, where approximately 15,000 US troops are deployed—only 2.8 percent as many as were in Vietnam at the height of that war.The DoD’s accounting practices appear to be an intentional effort to avoid accountability, says Armstrong. “A lot of the plugs—not all, but a substantial portion—are used to force general-ledger receipts to agree with the general budget reports, so what’s in the budget reports is basically left up to people’s imagination,” Armstrong says, adding, “Did the DoD improperly spend funds from one appropriated purpose on another? Who can tell?”“The United States government collects trillions of dollars each year for the purpose of funding essential functions, including national-security efforts at the Defense Department,” Senator Grassley told The Nation. “When unelected bureaucrats misuse, mismanage and misallocate taxpayer funds, it not only takes resources away from vital government functions, it weakens citizens’ faith and trust in their government.”This Pentagon accounting fraud is déjà vu all over again for Spinney. Back in the 1980s, he and a handful of other reform-minded colleagues exposed how the DoD used a similar accounting trick to inflate Pentagon spending—and to accumulate money for “off-the-books” programs. “DoD routinely over-estimated inflation rates for weapons systems,” Spinney recalled. “When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury, as required by law, but slipped them into something called a ‘Merged Surplus Account,'” he said.“In that way, the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion” (about $120 billion in today’s money), Spinney added. He believes that similar tricks are being used today to fund secret programs, possibly including US Special Forces activity in Niger. That program appears to have been undertaken without Congress’s knowledge of its true nature, which only came to light when a Special Forces unit was ambushed there last year, resulting in the deaths of four US soldiers.AMERICA AT NEVER-ENDING WARTHE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS ON CORPORATE WELFAREWilliam D. Hartung“Because of the plugs, there is no auditable way to track Pentagon funding and spending,” explains Asif Khan of the Government Accountability Office, the Congress’s watchdog on the federal bureaucracy. “It’s crucial in auditing to have a reliable financial record for prior years in order to audit the books for a current year,” notes Khan, the head of the National Security Asset Management unit at GAO. Plugs and other irregularities help explain why the Pentagon has long been at or near the top of the GAO’s list of “high risk” agencies prone to significant fraud, waste, and abuse, he adds.The Nation submitted detailed written questions and requested interviews with senior officials in the Defense Department before publishing this article. Only public-affairs staff would speak on the record. In an e-mailed response, Christopher Sherwood of the DoD’s Public Affairs office denied any accounting impropriety. Any transfer of funds between one budgetary account and another “requires a reprogramming action” by Congress, Sherwood wrote, adding that any such transfers amounting to more than 1 percent of the official DoD budget would require approval by “all four defense congressional committees.”The scale and workings of the Pentagon’s accounting fraud began to be ferreted out last year by a dogged research team led by Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics specializing in state and local government finance at Michigan State University. Skidmore and two graduate students spent months poring over DoD financial statement reviews done by the department’s Office of Inspector General. Digging deep into the OIG’s report on the Army’s 2015 financial statement, the researchers found some peculiar information. Appendix C, page 27, reported that Congress had appropriated $122 billion for the US Army that year. But the appendix also seems to report that the Army had received a cash deposit from the US Treasury of $794.8 billion. That sum was more than six times larger than Congress had appropriated—indeed, it was larger than the entire Pentagon budget for the year. The same appendix showed that the Army had accounts payable (accounting lingo for bills due) totaling $929.3 billion.SUBSCRIBE TO THE NATION FOR $2 A MONTH.Get unlimited digital access to the best independent news and analysis.“I wondered how you could possibly get those kinds of adjustments out of a $122 billion budget,” Skidmore recalled. “I thought, initially, ‘This is absurd!’ And yet all the [Office of Inspector General] seemed to do was say, ‘Here are these plugs.’ Then, nothing. Even though this kind of thing should be a red flag, it just died. So we decided to look further into it.”To make sure that fiscal year 2015 was not an anomaly, Skidmore and his graduate students expanded their inquiry, examining OIG reports on Pentagon financial records stretching back to 1998. Time and again, they found that the amounts of money reported as having flowed into and out of the Defense Department were gargantuan, often dwarfing the amounts Congress had appropriated: $1.7 trillion in 1998, $2.3 trillion in 1999, $1.1 trillion in 2000, $1.1 trillion in 2007, $875 billion in 2010, and $1.7 trillion in 2012, plus amounts in the hundreds of billions in other years.In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion. And that $21 trillion includes only plugs that were disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending.To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion. The disappearance of thousands of records adds further uncertainty. The upshot is that no one can know for sure how much of that $21 trillion was, or was not, being spent legitimately.THE COST OF OUR ENDLESS WARSAMERICA’S POST-9/11 WARS HAVE COST $5.9 TRILLIONWilliam D. HartungThat may even apply to the Pentagon’s senior leadership. A good example of this was Donald Rumsfeld, the notorious micromanaging secretary of defense during the Bush/Cheney administration. On September 10, 2001 Rumsfeld called a dramatic press conference at the Pentagon to make a startling announcement. Referring to the huge military budget that was his official responsibility, he said, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” This shocking news that an amount more than five times as large as the Pentagon’s FY 2001 budget of an estimated $313 billion was lost or even just “untrackable” was—at least for one 24-hour news cycle—a big national story, as was Secretary Rumsfeld’s comment that America’s adversary was not China or Russia, but rather was “closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” Equally stunning was Rumsfeld’s warning that the tracking down of those missing transactions “could be…a matter of life and death.” No Pentagon leader had ever before said such a thing, nor has anyone done so since then. But Rumsfeld’s exposé died quickly as, the following morning on September 11, four hijacked commercial jet planes plowed full speed into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Since that time, there has been no follow-up and no effort made to find the missing money, either.Recalling his decades inside the Pentagon, Spinney emphasized that the slippery bookkeeping and resulting fraudulent financial statements are not a result of lazy DoD accountants. “You can’t look at this as an aberration,” he said. “It’s business as usual. The goal is to paralyze Congress.”That has certainly been the effect. As one congressional staffer with long experience investigating Pentagon budgets, speaking on background because of the need to continue working with DoD officials, told The Nation, “We don’t know how the Pentagon’s money is being spent. We know what the total appropriated funding is for each year, but we don’t know how much of that funding gets spent on the intended programs, what things actually cost, whether payments are going to the proper accounts. If this kind of stuff were happening in the private sector, people would be fired and prosecuted.”DoD officials have long insisted that their accounting and financial practices are proper. For example, the Office of Inspector General has attempted to explain away the absurdly huge plugs in DoD’s financial statements as being a common, widely accepted accounting practice in the private sector.When this reporter asked Bridget Serchak, at the time a press spokesperson for the inspector general’s office, about the Army’s $6.5 trillion in plugs for fiscal year 2015, she replied, “Adjustments are made to the Army General Fund financial statement data…for various reasons such as correcting errors, reclassifying amounts and reconciling balances between systems…. For example, there was a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8 billion made to the $0.2 billion balance reported for Accounts Receivable.”SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONHOW BIG WIRELESS MADE US THINK THAT CELL PHONES ARE SAFE: A SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONMark Hertsgaard and Mark DowieThere is a grain of truth in Serchak’s explanation, but only a grain.As an expert in government budgeting, Skidmore confirmed that it is accepted practice to insert adjustments into budget reports to make both sides of a ledger agree. Such adjustments can be deployed in cases where receipts have been lost—in a fire, for example—or where funds were incorrectly classified as belonging to one division within a company rather than another. “But those kinds of adjustments should be the exception, not the rule, and should amount to only a small percentage of the overall budget,” Skidmore said.For its part, the inspector general’s office has blamed the fake numbers found in many DoD financial statements on the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), a huge DoD accounting operation based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In review after review, the inspector general’s office has charged that DFAS has been making up “unsupported” figures to plug into DoD’s financial statements, inventing ledger entries to back up those invented numbers, and sometimes even “removing” transaction records that could document such entries. Nevertheless, the inspector general has never advocated punitive steps against DFAS officials—a failure that suggests DoD higher-ups tacitly approve of the deceptions.Skidmore repeatedly requested explanations for these bookkeeping practices, he says, but the Pentagon response was stonewalling and concealment. Even the inspector general’s office, whose publicly available reports had been criticizing these practices for years, refused to answer the professor’s questions. Instead, that office began removing archived reports from its website. (Skidmore and his grad students, anticipating that possibility, had already downloaded the documents, which were eventually were restored to public access under different URLs.)Click to open the heavily redacted DoD OIG report on a US Navy financial statement for FY 2017.Nation inquiries have met with similar resistance. Case in point: A recent DoD OIG report on a US Navy financial statement for FY 2017. Although OIG audit reports in previous years were always made available online without restriction or censorship, this particular report suddenly appeared in heavily redacted form—not just the numbers it contained, but even its title! Only bureaucratic sloppiness enabled one to see that the report concerned Navy finances: Censors missed some of the references to the Navy in the body of the report, as shown in the passages reproduced here.A request to the Office of Inspector General to have the document uncensored was met with the response: “It was the Navy’s decision to censor it, and we can’t do anything about that.” At The Nation’s request, Senator Grassley’s office also asked the OIG to uncensor the report. Again, the OIG refused. A Freedom Of Information Act request by The Nation to obtain the uncensored document awaits a response.The GAO’s Khan was not surprised by the failure of this year’s independent audit of the Pentagon. Success, he points out, would have required “a good-faith effort from DoD officials, but to date that has not been forthcoming.” He added, “As a result of partial audits that were done in 2016, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have over 1,000 findings from auditors about things requiring remediation. The partial audits of the 2017 budget were pretty much a repeat. So far, hardly anything has been fixed.”Let that sink in for a moment: As things stand, no one knows for sure how the biggest single-line item in the US federal budget is actually being spent. What’s more, Congress as a whole has shown little interest in investigating this epic scandal. The absurdly huge plugs never even get asked about at Armed Services and Budget Committee hearings.One interested party has taken action—but it is action that’s likely to perpetuate the fraud. The normally obscure Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board sets the accounting standards for all federal agencies. Earlier this year, the board proposed a new guideline saying that agencies that operate classified programs should be permitted to falsify figures in financial statements and shift the accounting of funds to conceal the agency’s classified operations. (No government agency operates more classified programs than the Department of Defense, which includes the National Security Agency.) The new guideline became effective on October 4, just in time for this year’s end-of-year financial statements.SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONSPECIAL INVESTIGATION: THE DIRTY SECRET BEHIND WARREN BUFFETT’S BILLIONSDavid DayenSo here’s the situation: We have a Pentagon budget that a former DOD internal-audit supervisor, Jack Armstrong, bluntly labels “garbage.” We have a Congress unable to evaluate each new fiscal year’s proposed Pentagon budget because it cannot know how much money was actually spent during prior years. And we have a Department of Defense that gives only lip service to fixing any of this. Why should it? The status quo has been generating ever-higher DoD budgets for decades, not to mention bigger profits for Boeing, Lockheed, and other military contractors.The losers in this situation are everyone else. The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future.As President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who retired from the military as a five-star general after leading Allied forces to victory in World War II, said in a 1953 speech, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” What would Eisenhower say today about a Pentagon that deliberately misleads the people’s representatives in Congress in order to grab more money for itself while hunger, want, climate breakdown, and other ills increasingly afflict the nation?Correction: An earlier version of this article included a mention of $6.5 billion in plugs in 2015. In fact, as cited elsewhere in the story, the correct figure is $6.5 trillion. The article also cited an inaccurate figure for the percentage of federal tax dollars received by the Pentagon. In fact, the Pentagon receives more than half of every dollar of federal discretionary spending, not two out of every three federal tax dollars. The text has been corrected.MOST POPULAR1THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S WHITE WOMEN PROBLEM2IN A MAJOR SHIFT, SOUTH KOREA DEFIES ITS ALLIANCE WITH JAPAN3INDIVISIBLE IS WORKING HARD TO LIVE UP TO ITS NAME4BLACK SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA IS PUTTING ANTI-CAPITALISM ON THE MAP5A SOCCER GAME BECOMES AN ANTI-FASCIST DEMONSTRATION IN PORTLANDDave LindorffNation contributor Dave Lindorff also writes for Salon, London Review of Books, and Counterpunch. He is founder of ThisCantBeHappening.net. Author of four books, he was a 1990s Hong Kong/China correspondent for Business Week.