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PRESCOTT, Ariz. -- Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers].

Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.

When McCain's legislation passed in November 2005, the ranch owner gave the job of building as many as 12,000 homes to SunCor Development, a firm in Tempe, Ariz., run by Steven A. Betts, a longtime McCain supporter who has raised more than $100,000 for the presumptive Republican nominee. Betts said he and McCain never discussed the deal.

The Audubon Society described the exchange as the largest in Arizona history. The swap involved more than 55,000 acres of land in all, including rare expanses of desert woodland and pronghorn antelope habitat. The deal had support from many local officials and the Arizona Republic newspaper for its expansion of the Prescott National Forest. But it brought an outcry from some Arizona environmentalists when it was proposed in 2002, partly because it went through Congress rather than a process that allowed more citizen input.

Although the bill called for the two parcels to be of equal value, a federal forestry official told a congressional committee that he was concerned that "the public would not receive fair value" for its land. A formal appraisal has not yet begun. A town official opposed to the swap said other Yavapai Ranch land sold nine years ago for about $2,000 per acre, while some of the prime commercial land near a parcel that the developers will get has brought as much as $120,000 per acre.

In an interview, Betts said there is "absolutely no" connection between his contributions to McCain's presidential bids and the deal involving rancher Fred Ruskin and the Yavapai Ranch Limited Partnership. While his company's possible involvement was discussed casually before the bill's passage, Betts said SunCor did not sign on to the project until afterward. "At no time during the consideration of this legislation was there any involvement by officials of SunCor," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said in a written response to questions.

Betts is among a string of donors who have benefited from McCain-engineered land swaps. In 1994, the senator helped a lobbyist for land developer Del Webb Corp. pursue an exchange in the Las Vegas area, according to the Center for Public Integrity. McCain sponsored two bills, in 1991 and 1994, sought by donor Donald R. Diamond that yielded the developer thousands of acres in trade for national parkland.

In the late 1990s, McCain promoted a deal in Arizona's Tonto National Forest involving property part-owned by Great American Life Insurance, a company run by billionaire Carl H. Lindner Jr., a prolific contributor to national political parties and presidential candidates.

With the federal government owning vast stretches of Arizona land, and with pressure to meet increasing housing demands, McCain now views land swaps as beneficial, Rogers said. "He certainly recognizes that there have been well-documented abuses of legislative land exchanges, but every land exchange bill introduced by Senator McCain has been written with the highest regard for the public interest."

I always love this defense of corruption. "Sure, it looks really, really bad, but really, its nothing! So what if one of my big fundraisers got special legislative treatment. Its really just one big coincidence. And even if its not, its all in the public interest, so who cares?"

Do these people not realize how absurd this defense is? In a nation of 300 million people, there is only a tiny, tiny fraction that gets treatment like this. And all of them - yes, all of them - are in some way personally connected to legislators. That's how corruption works.

Now McCain and his people say "no lobbying happened here," so its all OK. But lobbying isn't the issue. The legislation is so specific that no lobbying was necessary. It has one purpose, and only one purpose - to set up a land swap between the federal government and one of McCain's biggest financial supporters. To have not recognized that fact, McCain and his people would have had to not ever actually read the legislation they were proposing. And if that's true, that's actually worse.

First, the news story:

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn't get one but came to the precinct anyway.

"One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, 'I don't want to go do that,'" Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren't given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. "You have to remember that some of these ladies don't walk well. They're in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts."

Karen Tumulty responds by saying "I don't think anyone expected this."

Except Josh Marshall, whose TPM empire has been covering this issue in depth for more than a year. And the title of his post tonight? "Not a Bug, a Feature.."

There has been extensive research on the subject of voter fraud, and all of it shows that fraud is virtually nonexistent. The point of these sorts of "reforms" isn't to prevent fraud; it is to prevent the types of people who don't have drivers licenses - the poor, the elderly, and the urban - from voting. Why? Because those people usually vote Democratic.

It really is becoming a truism: If you hear a politician or media figure say that "no one could have predicted" something, it means that for those who have been paying attention it has been obvious all along.

...then why is John McCain doing this?

Given Senator John McCain's signature stance on campaign finance reform, it was not surprising that he backed legislation last year requiring presidential candidates to pay the actual cost of flying on corporate jets. The law, which requires campaigns to pay charter rates when using such jets rather than cheaper first-class fares, was intended to reduce the influence of lobbyists and create a level financial playing field.

But over a seven-month period beginning last summer, Mr. McCain's cash-short campaign gave itself an advantage by using a corporate jet owned by a company headed by his wife, Cindy McCain, according to public records. For five of those months, the plane was used almost exclusively for campaign-related purposes, those records show.

Mr. McCain's campaign paid a total of $241,149 for the use of that plane from last August through February, records show. That amount is approximately the cost of chartering a similar jet for a month or two, according to industry estimates.

The senator was able to fly so inexpensively because the law specifically exempts aircraft owned by a candidate or his family or by a privately held company they control. The Federal Election Commission adopted rules in December to close the loophole -- rules that would have required substantial payments by candidates using family-owned planes -- but the agency soon lost the requisite number of commissioners needed to complete the rule making.

Because that exemption remains, Mr. McCain's campaign was able to use his wife's corporate plane like a charter jet while paying first-class rates, several campaign finance experts said. Several of those experts, however, added that his campaign's actions, while keeping with the letter of law, did not reflect its spirit.

"This amounts to a subsidy for his campaign, which is notable given how badly they were struggling last year," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that collects and analyzes campaign data.

Josh Marshall asks the right question:

Reading the piece, one question that suggests itself is why go through all the roundabout? McCain's wife can give him as much free air travel as she wants. That's just self-financing, which lots of candidates do completely legally. John Kerry, remember, took a loan out on his home to pour money into his campaign during its nadir just before Iowa. But remember, this was also around the time that McCain was kinda sorta opting in to the public financing system. So I'd be curious to hear how these two things would have interacted, what the legal repercussions would have been.

This reminds me of that story that broke near the ned of Giuliani's campaign about the potential misuse of funds on a security detail for his mistress. In the end that there didn't appear to be any illegal activity, but it looked so strange that it damaged him nonetheless. The Mayor's rep, after all, was that he had "cleaned up" the city and its government, and that story went directly against that narrative.

Same problem here. McCain's myth is that he is a squeaky clean champion of campaign finance reform. Worse still, the issue of private jets is something he has taken on directly within the past year. And yet here he is flying around on his wife's private jet and not fully disclosing the cost to the public. Why? He doesn't need to do this, so why does he feel the need?

UPDATE: Philly.com's Dick Polman does some excellent follow-up:

Cindy McCain, chairwoman of one of the nation's largest Anheuser-Busch distribution firms, and daughter of the rich guy who financed McCain's political career in 1980, just happened to own a midsized corporate jet. Flying in that jet would be a very effective way to slash costs and keep hope alive. But McCain last July specifically insisted that he would not tap his wife's assets in order to salvage his candidacy. He publicly stated: "I have never thought about it. I would never do such a thing..."

Well, apparently he was against "such a thing" before he decided he was for it - because he started flying on his wife's jet last August, and kept doing it all winter, well into the new year.

It should be emphasized that flying in a family jet is not illegal. The feds, however, have been trying to level the playing field, to ensure that rich candidates with their own planes don't have an unfair advantage. The feds are (slowly) working up some new rules that would require candidates enjoying such elitist assets to pay more than a token amount for the privilege - by ponying up roughly the same amount of money that it would cost to fly on a chartered corporate jet. But those rules have not been finalized yet, so McCain over a seven-month period reportedly paid a relative pittance for his plane travel.

Result: As a member in long standing of Arizona's economic elite, McCain landed in a comfortable safety net and seriously slashed his overhead costs when he needed to most. A less-endowed candidate with the same campaign financial headaches might have simply pulled the plug on a White House bid.

And that's the real point here: without this safety net, one that he has supposedly spent his career trying to tear down, McCain would never have been able to survive the primary. When others do it, he wants it to be illegal, but when he does it, it is OK? That's just nonsensical.

And yet the maverick reputation lives on....

When the Japanese tortured in WWII, they were doing it in the name of national security.

When the Germans tortured in WWII, they too were doing it for their national security.

When Stalin tortured dissidents, he said did it to protect his nation's security.

When Pol Pot's regime tortured its captives, it did it to defend the regime.

When Torquemada tortured heretics, he did it for God.

Even the Holocaust was justified in the name of defending the state.

Regimes that torture always believe themselves justified. To believe otherwise is to show a level of historical ignorance so complete that it is astonishing.

Unless you are willing to embrace a form of moral relativism, creating a world when good and evil depend wholly on the excuses and arguments we offer to one another, there must be objective standards against which all of us can be compared.

Keep all that in mind as you read this. NYT:

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity," a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public....

"What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense," said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University.

The logic: So long as we believe we are right, what we are doing cannot be wrong. According to the Bush administration and its defenders, morality and the law are subjective, relative, and totally unmoored from any universal standard. Forget god, religion, natural law, or any other system of beliefs that you hold dear. Under this justification, none of them matter. The law is what the defenders of the state say it is. Ideals and beliefs are irrelevant.

When others use this logic to torture Americans, what will we say? When our enemies use our own words and logic against us, to whom will we turn? We will have no one to blame but ourselves. It is only a matter of time before this is turned against us. It is inevitable.

We cannot defend our beliefs by abandoning them.

We cannot protect our ideals by forgetting them.

Why are they doing this to our country? How can anyone defend this?

This is not who we are. This is not why so many struggled for so long to create this nation. We are dishonoring ourselves and our ancestors through these actions. All of their hopes, dreams, and ideals live in us, and if we abandon them, all that they lived and all that they dreamed means nothing. Nothing.

Why are we doing this? Why?

I don't often link to diaries at Daily Kos, but this one is an absolute must read. Highlights:

Earlier today, I promised you Kossacks an eyewitness account of John Ashcroft's speech on "Leadership in Troubled Times" at Knox College this evening, which I just got back from attending. So, while it's still fresh in my mind, here's how it went--including the question I asked that made him lose his cool completely.

From the transcript of the Q+A session, with the final segment the Q+A between the dKos diarist and Ashcroft:

TOM: This story was made public by ABC a few weeks ago. It claims that you, Rice, Tenet and others met in the White House to discuss different methods of "enhanced interrogation," is that correct?

ASHCROFT: (angrily) Correct? Is what correct? Is it correct that this story ran on ABC? I don't know that. I don't know anything about it! Is it a real story? When was this story, huh? Huh?
TOM: Um, early April, April 9th, I think...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) You think? You think? You don't even know! Next question!
TOM: The article says that you discussed "whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning"...
ASHCROFT: I said, next question!

[...]

ASHCROFT: No. No it doesn't violate the Geneva Conventions. As for other laws, well, the U.S. is a party to the United Nations Convention against Torture. And that convention, well, when we join a treaty like that we send it to the Senate to be ratified, and when the Senate ratifies they often add qualifiers, reservations, to the treaty which affect what exactly we follow. Now, I don't have a copy of the convention in front of me...
ME: (holding up my copy) I do! (boisterous applause and whistling from the audience) Would you like to borrow it?
ASHCROFT: (after a pause) Uh, you keep a hold of it. Now, as I was saying, I don't have it with me but I'm pretty sure it defines torture as something that leaves lasting scars or physical damage...
A STUDENT FROM THE AUDIENCE: Liar! You liar! (the student is shushed by the audience)
ASHCROFT: So no, waterboarding does not violate international law.

[...]

ME: First off, Mr. Ashcroft, I'd like to apologize for the rudeness of some of my fellow students. It was uncalled for--we can disagree civilly, we don't need that. (round of applause from the audience, and Ashcroft smiles) I have here in my hand two documents. One of them, you know, is the text of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which, point of interest, says nothing about "lasting physical damage"...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) Do you have the Senate reservations to it?
ME: No, I don't. Do you happen to know what they are?
ASHCROFT: (angrily) I don't have them memorized, no. I don't have time to go around memorizing random legal facts. I just don't want these people in the audience to go away saying, "He was wrong, she had the proof right in her hand!" Because that's not true. It's a lie. If you don't have the reservations, you don't have anything. Now, if you want to bring them another time, we can talk, but...
ME: Actually, Mr. Ashcroft, my question was about this other document. (laughter and applause) This other document is a section from the judgment of the Tokyo War Tribunal. After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan. Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. And among the tortures listed was the "water treatment," which we nowadays call waterboarding...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) This is a speech, not a question. I don't mind, but it's not a question.
ME: It will be, sir, just give me a moment. The judgment describes this water treatment, and I quote, "the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach." One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information. Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country--exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do--do you believe that his sentence was unjust? (boisterous applause and shouts of "Good question!")
ASHCROFT: (angrily) Now, listen here. You're comparing apples and oranges, apples and oranges. We don't do anything like what you described.
ME: I'm sorry, I was under the impression that we still use the method of putting a cloth over someone's face and pouring water down their throat...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting, red-faced, shouting) Pouring! Pouring! Did you hear what she said? "Putting a cloth over someone's face and pouring water on them." That's not what you said before! Read that again, what you said before!
ME: Sir, other reports of the time say...
ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read what you said before! (cries of "Answer her fucking question!" from the audience) Read it!
ME: (firmly) Mr. Ashcroft, please answer the question.
ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read it back!
ME: "The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach."
ASHCROFT: (shouting) You hear that? You hear it? "Forced!" If you can't tell the difference between forcing and pouring...does this college have an anatomy class? If you can't tell the difference between forcing and pouring...
ME: (firmly and loudly) Mr. Ashcroft, do you believe that Yukio Asano's sentence was unjust? Answer the question. (pause)
ASHCROFT: (more restrained) It's not a fair question; there's no comparison. Next question! (loud chorus of boos from the audience)

And the verdict?

My final verdict on Ashcroft: this is what Hannah Arendt meant by "the banality of evil." He seems like a normal guy (albeit one with some real anger issues), and yet...well, I don't need to finish that sentence. Nonetheless, I'm very, very glad I went, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

That's exactly, precisely correct. War criminals are often portrayed as if they are all either sadistic jailers or Adolf Hitler himself, but as history shows they are also far too often civil servants like Ashcroft who were, in their own eyes, just doing their job. But as the Nuremburg Trials clearly established, in the eyes of the law all are equally responsible for the evil they helped create, something that Ashcroft himself must surely understand.

Their day of reckoning is coming. It may take years, sadly perhaps even decades, but it will come.

Nice to see people are starting to dig into McCain's record. The Straight Talking, clean legislating myth is just that - a myth - and the sooner the public realizes that, the better.

NYT:

Donald R. Diamond, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer, was racing to snap up a stretch of virgin California coast freed by the closing of an Army base a decade ago when he turned to an old friend, Senator John McCain.

When Mr. Diamond wanted to buy land at the base, Fort Ord, Mr. McCain assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale, according to people involved and a deposition Mr. Diamond gave for a related lawsuit. When he appealed to a nearby city for the right to develop other property at the former base, Mr. Diamond submitted Mr. McCain's endorsement as "a close personal friend."

Writing to officials in the city, Seaside, Calif., the senator said, "You will find him as honorable and committed as I have."

Courting local officials and potential partners, Mr. Diamond's team promised that he could "help get through some of the red tape in dealing with the Department of the Army" because Mr. Diamond "has been very active with Senator McCain," a partner said in a deposition.

For Mr. McCain, the Arizona Republican who has staked two presidential campaigns on pledges to avoid even the appearance of dispensing an official favor for a donor, Mr. Diamond is the kind of friend who can pose a test.

A longtime political patron, Mr. Diamond is one of the elite fund-raisers Mr. McCain's current presidential campaign calls Innovators, having raised more than $250,000 so far. At home, Mr. Diamond is sometimes referred to as "The Donald," Arizona's answer to Donald Trump -- an outsized personality who invites public officials aboard his flotilla of yachts (the Ace, King, Jack and Queen of Diamonds), specializes in deals with the government, and unabashedly solicits support for his business interests from the recipients of his campaign contributions.

Mr. McCain has occasionally rebuffed Mr. Diamond's entreaties as inappropriate, but he has also taken steps that benefited his friend's real estate empire. Their 26-year relationship illuminates how Mr. McCain weighs requests from a benefactor against his vows, adopted after a brush with scandal two decades ago, not to intercede with government authorities on behalf of a donor or take other official action that serves no clear public interest.

In California, the McCain aide's assistance with the Army helped Mr. Diamond complete a purchase in 1999 that he soon turned over for a $20 million profit. And Mr. McCain's letter of recommendation reinforced Mr. Diamond's selling point about his McCain connections as he pursued -- and won in 2005 -- a potentially much more lucrative deal to develop a resort hotel and luxury housing.

And "The Donald" sounds like a real gem:

Mr. Diamond, for his part, said Mr. McCain had only done his job. "I think that is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents," he said. "When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn't you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation."

But associates say he revels in his ability to "work the system," as his friend and sometimes partner, Stanley Abrams, put it: "Nobody is as connected as Donald."

Mr. Diamond is close to most of Arizona's Congressional delegation and is candid about his expectations as a fund-raiser. "I want my money back, for Christ's sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?"

To raise money for Mr. McCain, Mr. Diamond invites local Republicans to make fund-raising calls from his Tucson office. Ray Carroll, a member of the council that controls zoning in Pima County, Ariz., said Mr. Diamond followed up on one fund-raising session with a thank-you note "on behalf of Mr. McCain," sending a copy to the senator.

"To reciprocate, if you need any zoning in the county, let me know," Mr. Diamond wrote. (Mr. Diamond said it was the kind of joke he often made.)

Mr. McCain has campaigned as a critic of the corrupting influence of money and politics, saying he had learned a lesson from a late 1980s scandal over his part in an intervention with banking regulators examining a savings and loan controlled by a patron, Charles Keating. Since then, Mr. McCain vowed to embrace ethics standards that set him apart from many colleagues.

"I have carefully avoided situations that might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office," he wrote in his memoir, "Worth the Fighting For" (Random House, 2002).

Mr. McCain once publicly criticized Mr. Diamond as lobbying too hard for his own financial interests. In 1995, Mr. McCain called it "unheard of" that Mr. Diamond had hired a Washington lobbyist to try to block construction of a federal building in Tucson that threatened to take away some of his rental income. "I didn't talk to him for one year," Mr. Diamond said of Mr. McCain. "I was annoyed."

... Though Mr. McCain helped with the Fort Ord deals, Mr. Diamond said, he still thinks that Mr. McCain is too worried about avoiding any appearance of a favor. "He doesn't bring home enough for the state," Mr. Diamond said. "It is a sore subject between us."

A year? My goodness! What a noble and honorable man that Senator McCain is. He went a whole year without talking to his ethically challenged friend! Such a noble sacrifice! Such a pillar of strength! Except:

Over the years, Mr. Diamond and his wife, Joan, visited the McCains at their ranch in Sedona, Ariz., and entertained them in their Tucson home and in the Bahamas, where Mr. Diamond sometimes keeps his 134-foot yacht, the Queen of Diamonds. In 2001, the two men attended a Yankees-Diamondback World Series game together. "He is just very, very good company," Mr. Diamond said of Mr. McCain. "I knew all his people and the staff."

Now to be perfectly clear about this, I'm not naive enough to think that Sen. McCain is the only one who behaves this way. I wish this sort of thing never happened in politics, but it does, and to some degree we must all accept that. What makes this different, however, is that McCain has deliberately cultivated an image as a truth teller who embodies all that is good, right, and ethical in politics. His entire public image is based on the idea that because of his character, this is something he would never do. It's a lie, of course, a sad fact most Americans have not yet recognized.

Will this story help? Honestly, I doubt it. For reasons that I cannot understand, the NYT decided to run this on the day of the PA primary. Had they waited a few days, it surely would have dominated the days news. But today? Today it will be sadly become an afterthought.

Amazing the way the liberal elite media favors its own, isn't it?

Via Laura Rozen.... That's the total amount of Army accounting entries that hadn't been properly reviewed and substantiated in the first three quarters of 2007.

Portfolio reports:

Since 2004, the Pentagon has spent roughly $16 billion annually to maintain and modernize the military's business systems, but most are as unreliable as ever--even as the surge in defense spending is creating more room for error. The basic defense budget for 2007 was $439.3 billion, up 48 percent from 2001, excluding the vast additional sums appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to federal regulators and current and former Pentagon officials, the accounting process is so obsolete and error prone that it's virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up. While the department's brass has made a few patchwork improvements, billions are still unaccounted for. The problem is so deeply rooted that, 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited, the Pentagon still can't be.

For the first three quarters of 2007, $1.1 trillion in Army accounting entries hadn't been properly reviewed and substantiated, according to the Department of Defense's inspector general. In 2006, $258.2 billion of recorded withdrawals and payments from the Army's main account were unsupported. It's as if the Army had submitted multibillion-dollar expense reports without any receipts.

Preoccupied with protecting their turf, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines continue to maintain separate, increasingly outdated systems that can't talk to each other, trace disbursements, or detect overbilling by contractors. At the Indianapolis facility, as at the Defense Department's four other main U.S. centers for financial operations, accounting programs under the same roof can't share information without extensive jury-rigging, as though contracts, payments, and accounting had nothing to do with one another.

"In the Defense Department, what you have now are material weaknesses that are in every single area, in every part of the department, so deep and so wide you do not really have any way of figuring out where money is being spent," says Linda Bilmes, a federal budget expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Every year, the Pentagon tries to justify its budget request to Congress by submitting three years of financial data: "actual" performance for the past fiscal year plus projections for the current year and the next. But because of the lack of reliable accounting, these totals are largely fictional. That, in turn, raises major questions about whether the government will be able to meet skyrocketing commitments for future spending on ships, planes, and high-tech ground weapons, especially given the expected growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the impact of tax cuts.

According to David Walker, who recently left his post as head of the Government Accountability Office, the failure of the Pentagon's outdated and incompatible systems to keep tabs on expenditures--even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan eat up an ever-bigger chunk of the federal budget--puts several Defense Department agencies high on the G.A.O.'s list of federal programs that are mismanaged and prone to fraud, waste, and abuse.

John Evans, a retired Pentagon official who oversaw more than half of the defense budget, says that all this just encourages the military branches to conceal spending. "If you want to know how much one of the services is paying, you have to ask them," he says. "They say, 'Why do you want to know?'" When Evans did a formal review to see if spending was on track, he says "it was like a C.S.I. crime drama to find out where the services spent money and where they squirreled it away."

If you can believe this, it actually gets worse from there. But here's my question: does it make be too cynical to think that this is a feature, and not a bug?

More:

In 1990, Congress enacted legislation requiring all federal agencies to pass independent audits. Every year, the Defense inspector general dispatched dozens of auditors to the military's financial and accounting centers. Every year, they reported back that the job couldn't be done. Defense Department records were in such disarray and were so lacking in documentation that any attempt would be futile. In 2000, the inspector general told Congress that his auditors stopped counting after finding $2.3 trillion in unsupported entries made to force financial data to agree.

In 2002, Congress relented. Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that "material amounts" in its financial reports can't be substantiated.

That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."

The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn't envisioned until 2016.

Without an audit, anecdotal evidence suggests, contractor fraud is likely to go undetected for years. Two South Carolina sisters who supplied small parts to the military bilked it of more than $20 million by charging wildly inflated shipping costs for low-priced items, like $998,798 for shipping two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas. The scheme lasted six years before they were caught in 2006.

And that's why I think many people see this as a feature. Over the past few yeas, there have been plenty of high profile stories of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq that never got investigated. If you were the CEO of Halliburton or KBR, and you knew that there was no way of tracking payments and receipts, it would make economic sense to commit fraud. It would also be immoral, but hey - this is war, right?

Please tell me that I'm being too cynical. Please?