The US Department of Defense has reportedly refused to investigate hundreds of purchases of child pornography by its personnel.
According to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon identified over 260 employees who purchased child porn in 2006, The Upshot news blog reported on Friday.
The purchases were uncovered in a larger civilian investigation conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). An investigative arm of the United States Department of Defense then cross-checked the names against military databases to generate the list of Defense Department employees.
The names included staffers for the secretary of defense, contractors for the ultra-secretive National Security Agency, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This is while Pentagon investigated only 52 of the cases and prosecuted just a handful of the identified people.
Among those charged were Gary Douglass Grant, a captain in the US Army Reserves and a military prosecutor. He pled guilty to child porn charges in California in 2009 after investigators discovered child pornography on his computer.
Others charged in similar cases were several contractors for the National Security Agency with Top Secret clearances, one of whom fled the US after being indicted and is believed to be in Libya, the report added.
However, the vast majority of those investigated were never charged and 212 people on ICE's list were never investigated at all.
A source familiar with the investigations, who requested anonymity, confirmed that departmental resources and priorities were decisive factors in letting inquiries lapse.
"We were stuck in a situation where we had some great information, but didn't have the resources to run with it," the source told The Upshot.
