Word: pentagonals
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Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World By Trevor Paglen 324 pages; Dutton...
...sheer breadth of the Pentagon's secret world: "Every year, the United States spends more than $50 billion to fund a secret world of classified military and intelligence activities, a world of secret airplanes and unacknowledged spacecraft, 'black' military units and covert prisons, a secret geography that military and intelligence insiders call the 'black world'...Approximately four million people in the United States hold security clearances to work on classified projects in the black world. By way of contrast, the federal government employs approximately 1.8 million civilians in the 'white' world...
...date, a handful of these waivers have been proposed, including, most controversially, one for William Lynn, a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon who has been tapped to serve in the No. 2 job at the Pentagon. But the controversy over the waivers, which have been criticized by both Democratic and Republican Senators, is just one of the perception problems dogging Obama's new ethics policy. Another issue stems from the people nominated to the Administration who have worked in the lobbying business but are not technically lobbyists - people, in other words, like Daschle or former Senator George Mitchell...
...Army for failing to conduct adequate testing before contracting for the armor. This is the second audit to blame the Army for the quality of body armor. A year ago, the IG found that the Army failed to follow federal contracting rules in procuring armor and concluded that the Pentagon had "no assurance" that nearly half of 28 contracts - worth nearly $3 billion - "met the required standards...
...audit's finding was contested by the Pentagon. In a press release, the Army said it "had already identified problems raised by the IG and has moved aggressively to fix them." The statement says that "among the many important improvements already instituted is assigning responsibility for article testing to the Army Test and Evaluation Command instead of using outside contractors...