Free Talk Live

The U.S. Department of Defense got more than $9 billion from the sale of Iraqi oil and other revenue streams to be used for reconstruction inside the war-damaged nation and spent it but now cannot document where $8.7 billion of those funds went, according to an inspector general's report published online.

Troubled U.S. government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae on Monday asked for 8.4 billion dollars in additional federal aid to cover its huge losses.

Fannie Mae reported earlier Monday that it lost 13.1 billion dollars in the first quarter, or 2.29 dollars a share. It lost 23. 2 billion dollars in the same period a year ago.

The new aid will bring the total bill for rescuing Fannie and its sister company Freddie Mac to 145 billion dollars. The Obama administration has pledged to provide an unlimited amount of funds to Fannie and Freddie to keep them solvent.

According to previously undisclosed estimates, the United States is planning to spend $6 billion annually on supporting Afghanistan’s military and police starting in 2011, an expense which given the weak Afghan economy will probably continue more or less forever.

But the estimate could also be unrealistically low, as the administration spent about $9 billion this year and is planning to spend $11.6 billion next year on this expense.

You pay your taxes, right? Well, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues in a new paper that the explosion of U.S. cash — $450 billion in ten years, thrown into a country with a $29 billion annual GDP – put Afghanistan on a path to institutional dysfunction.

The now infamous Wikileaks recently released a cable from Afghanistan revealing U.S. government contractor DynCorp threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment.

On September 10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld mentioned that thanks to "military bureaucracy" that trillions (with a T) could not be accounted for, saying it was a matter of "life and dead." Then, 24 hrs. later world history was changed forever, and most have seemingly forgotten about this financial disaster.

The fiscal 2011 funding bill roundly hailed for its "historic" spending cuts actually raised government spending by more than $3 billion, according to a new report.The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded Monday evening, "Total discretionary outlays in 2011 will be $3.2 billion higher as a result of the legislation, CBO estimates—an increase of $7.5 billion for defense programs, partially offset by a net reduction of $4.4 billion in other spending."

It has emerged that the multi-billion-dollar DCGS-A military computer system that was designed to help the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan simply doesn’t work. DCGS-A is meant to accrue intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and provide real-time battlefield analysis and the current location of high-value targets. According to two former intelligence officers that have worked with the system, however, it has hindered the war effort rather than helped.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released its final major audit over the weekend, delivering quite a bottom line: it cannot say how much U.S taxpayers lost while trying to rebuild Iraq, but it was a lot. The U.S. government Iraq relief and reconstruction program had serious internal control weaknesses that put billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of fraud, waste, and abuse. The precise amount lost to fraud and waste may never be known, but SIGIR’s audits and investigations have demonstrated that the amount could be substantial.