The Yahoo News blog, The Upshot, reported on a disturbing story of more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department buying on-line child pornography. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) opened investigations into only 20 percent of the individuals identified, and succeeded in prosecuting just a handful. While this may not surprise most readers, the story gets more alarming when it is revealed that many of the people investigated for buying on-line child pornography had the highest security clearances including Top Secret (TS) and Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (SCI) security clearances. As one commenter noted in the comments section of the story, “Is anyone surprised we saw the human abuses at Guantanamo, etc, with people like this in charge?”
As reported by The Upshot,
Project Flicker investigative reports obtained by The Upshot through the Freedom of Information Act, which you can read here, show that DCIS investigators identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online. All told, 76 of the individuals had Secret or higher clearances. However, DCIS investigated only 52 of the suspects, and just 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography. The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) cross-checked the ICE list against military databases to come up with a list of Defense employees and contractors who appeared to be guilty of purchasing child pornography. The names included staffers for the secretary of defense, contractors for the ultra-secretive National Security Agency, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
These kinds of stories reveal how policy papers supporting increased defense spending from Washington D.C. think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are nothing short of propaganda.
Perhaps this kind of story should be filed under the category, military entertainment complex?
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