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A pair of Pentagon stories were filed by CBS. Sharyl Attkisson's Eye on Your Money investigation into porkbarrel spending in the USAF F-35 Lightning II fighter jet program would have been even more impressive if NBC had filed it. It was an expose of unnecessary earmark funding being funneled to General Electric--if NBC had called it a Fleecing of America it would have collected double brownie points, first for going after waste-fraud-abuse and second for displaying editorial independence from its corporate parent. But Attkisson got the jump and deserves the kudos. The Congressional argument for granting a contract to GE to develop an alternate engine for the fighter is that competition improves quality; the Pentagon claims it is happy with the original design by Pratt & Whitney and that the $1.6bn to invent an unnecessary rival "would be better spent for force protection."
Attkisson's colleague Kimberly Dozier catalogued the corners that army recruiters are cutting to make quota. The military not only accepts lower standards of fitness and intelligence than in the past, but also "the number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests has nearly tripled in the past five years." Dozier explained that the military grants a "moral waiver" and, in order to make sure they get a stigma-free second chance, commanders are not told whether or not a rookie had a record. Sometimes soldiers revert to criminal activity while "some chances work out." She cited Angelo Vaccaro as a success story: he was granted a waiver and earned two Silver Star medals. The only trouble was that the medals were posthumous--so it is not clear that things did "work out" after all.
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