Grassley wants answers to Pentagon spending and deaths of aliens

A federal report finds the Pentagon can’t account for more than a trillion dollars in transactions and has lost track of dozens of tanks, airplanes and missiles. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who has slammed the Defense Department for years over things like 640-dollar toilet seats, says changes must be made in how tax dollars are being spent — and wasted. The Bush administration has unveiled the “Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act” which would make major changes in how the Pentagon spends tax dollars. It’s expected to be debated in Congress this week. Grassley says he’s been working on raising accounting standards and to strengthen the Inspector General’s office to make sure it’s monitoring the Pentagon. Also, he says checks shouldn’t be written without being matched against goods or services received. Grassley says “There’s been a practice over the last several years of the Defense Department writing an awful lot of big checks and not being able to prove they received anything for it…We’ve got billions of dollars in unmatched disbursements along that line as a result of that lack of financial control.” On another issue, there have been -no- arrests in the deaths of 11 illegal immigrants whose bodies were found in a railcar in the western Iowa town of Denison last fall. Senator Grassley fears the same “devilish entrepreneurs” who smuggled those people into the U-S were responsible for last week’s deaths of 19 people in a truck in south Texas. Grassley wrote a letter to the U-S Attorney General months ago asking for an investigation in the Denison case. He’s written a new letter, asking whether the cases could have been connected and why arrests weren’t made sooner. Grassley says in the letter, the investigation of the deaths in western Iowa has come to an apparent standstill “and justice to the alien smugglers has not been served.” He adds, “This investigation is important in order to save the lives of those who dream of living in America.”