Back in the Bush era, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency provided the Pentagon with a list of 5,200 employees suspected of viewing child pornography. Five years later, the Boston Globe discovered that 1,700 of those cases had yet to be investigated. We filed a FOIA. Their investigation is still "open."

In many ways, we all owe Senator Chuck Grassley a debt of gratitude for bringing this oversight to the attention of America back in 2011. The Republican senator from Iowa—despite being a part of that spooky Christian cult The Family (the one that Harper's exposed years ago; the one that pushes things like "free-market theology"), and despite being hilariously bad at Twitter—turns out to be a pretty good senator.

As the Boston Globe reported over three years ago now, it was Grassley who was pressing for answers regarding Pentagon efforts to investigate the troubling allegations brought to light by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency's "Operation Flicker" in 2006. Grassley demanded answers from then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the DoD's then-IG Gordon Heddell.

"These cases were not considered a priority by the Defense Department in the first place, and they should have been,'' Grassley told the Globe.

The Pentagon reportedly reviewed 3,500 of the 5,200 cases submitted by ICE, arguing that many of them were not in fact affiliated with the DoD "as an employee, a contractor, a retiree or a DoD dependent." However, the IG's office did uncover something like 302 defense and intelligence agency employees who allegedly had viewed child pornography on their computers, according to the Globe's investigation. The Pentagon said that they wound up pursuing 70 of those cases, resulting in only a handful of prosecutions. Many cases, they said, were dropped due to a lack of evidence—however they also told the Globe that the previous leadership had not treated the child pornography allegations as a priority.

Facing the burst of negative press from Grassley and the Globe, then-DoD IG Heddell assured the paper that his office was "conducting an aggressive pursuit of anyone implicated in Operation Flicker and that it is a key investigative priority.''

That was 2011. This past summer, because it is Black Bag's mandate to pursue any and all evidence of elite Satanic child ritual abuse cults, and more jejune forms of evil, we filed a FOIA request seeking an update on the DoD IG's progress.

We were denied these documents, broadly on three grounds: Firstly, that certain materials would "constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy"—a legitimate concern for closed cases in which no wrongdoing was found and disclosure of the investigation's details could needlessly trouble an innocent party; Secondly, the usual sources and methods sort of thing; thirdly, and most importantly, because "additional documents responsive to your request are currently part of an open investigation." In other words, they are still not finished with these "key investigative priority" cases.

You can see their response to our FOIA below. One thing you will notice—after the fact that I doodled all over it during an unrelated phone call—is that the Pentagon didn't need to actually disclose this last fact, because the FOIA request explicitly requested only those documents pertaining to the "closed cases investigated." So, either someone was really asleep at the wheel processing this FOIA request, or someone kinda wanted America to know that this mess still hasn't been fully cleaned up yet:

Perversely curious readers can dig into the previously released closed case files pertaining to the Pentagon's "Project Flicker" investigations here and here.

Even more perversely curious readers may be wondering how 3,500 alleged child pornography cases submitted by ICE whittled all the way down to 70 cases worth pursuing. One answer may lie with the strange, broadening definition of child pornography, following legal precedents similar to the 2006 case against photographer Jeff Pierson arguing that photos of clothed minors in leotards, in poses deemed lascivious, would constitute child pornography. Another, may lie with cases, like the March 14th, 2007 investigation detailed on page 12 of this DoD IG report, in which ICE referred cases to the Pentagon that (um) merely turned out to be petite barely legal adult performers whose disquietingly innocent visages ICE failed to run against the National Child Victim Identification Program. One could certainly also get away with attributing some percentage of this winnowing from 3,500-to-70 to whatever institutional culture has permitted all those sexual assaults scandals to proliferate over the course of our Global War on Terror. One could also get away with just blaming the patriarchy. No one is gonna stop you. You could probably even stick your neck out really far, along with conspiracy freak oracle David Icke, and attribute this to some demonic sex orgy rituals performed by our elite global leaders and the inter-dimensional reptillian aliens with whom they share their bloodlines. Most people will honestly be too depressed by the substance of these child porn allegations to actually fight you on your "analysis."

In any event, we now have a definitive answer to the question we posed last July: No, we did not finish looking into those 1,700 Pentagon child porn cases.

[photo by the U.S. Air Force, via WIRED.]

To contact the author, email matthew.phelan@gawker.com, pgp public key.