The Pentagon declined to investigate more than 200 employees or contractors who purchased child pornography online, according to a report from Yahoo! News.
According to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who used their credit cards or Paypal to purchase pictures online of children in sexual situations in 2006. But DCIS investigated only 52 of those suspects, and only 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography, the report said.
The individuals suspected included 76 individuals with secret security clearance or higher and nine with access to the nation's most sensitive secrets. They included staffers for the secretary of Defense, contractors working for the National Security Agency (NSA) and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Among those charged was Gary Douglass Grant, a captain in the Army Reserves and military prosecutor. Grant pleaded guilty last year to charges of possession of obscene matter of a minor in a sexual act in California. Another fomer NSA contractor fled the country after being indicted and is believed to be in Libya.
But the majority of individuals identified were never charged or investigated at all. The names were turned up during a 2006 investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement known as "Project Flickr" that identified more than 5,000 Americans who subscribed to sites that offered child pornography. DCIS cross-checked the ICE list against military databases to come up with the names of the 264 Pentagon employees and contractors identified.
