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SBA Spokesman Terry Sutherland’s Halloween costume is the Invisible Man By Lloyd Chapman SBA Press Office Director Terry Sutherland has become invisible to the press in one of the biggest whirlwinds of fraud and controversy the SBA has faced in quite some time. Over the last few months the SBA has been hit with one bad story after another and yet Terry Sutherland who admitted he was “assigned” to take over the SBA Press Office is nowhere to be found. As one of the Pentagon’s top public relations executives for over two decades, Sutherland was likely selected to do damage control on the widely reported diversion of billions of dollars in federal small business contras to Fortune 500 firms and hundreds of the largest corporations in the world. Sutherland did not accompany SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet in a congressional hearing where members of the House Small Business Committee lambasted her for including billions in federal small business contracts to Fortune 500 defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Chevron. Sutherland has also had no response for journalists after SBA Inspector General uncovered that the SBA significantly inflated their small business goal statistics by including billions of dollars’ worth of contracts to ineligible firms. Terry Sutherland had no comment on a story published by the Washington Post titled, “How 8,500 large companies will become small businesses overnight.” In August, the SBA was forced to release over 2000 of Sutherlands emails after they were requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the American Small Business League (ASBL). Sutherland’s emails seem to indicate he actually works out of his home and not SBA headquarters and is still closely associated to the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. The ASBL intends to intensify their FOIA campaign to uncover more information on Terry Sutherland, the SBA Press Office and other SBA executives. We expect to uncover evidenced the SBA Press Office is working to discourage journalists from reporting on the rampant fraud that has been uncovered at the Pentagon in a wide variety of SBA managed programs. I am confident once we receive all of Sutherland’s emails and phone records we will likely prove the SBA Press Office has also launched a major campaign in conjunction with one or more of the largest public relations firms in Washington to keep journalists from reporting on the ASBL’s successful campaign to expose fraud and abuse in federal small business programs primarily at the Pentagon and do everything possible to keep me off national television. I have heard first hand accounts from journalists how the SBA Press Office will use a wide variety in tactics such as conference calls to intimidate and threaten journalists and their tactics to kill stories on the rampant fraud that has been uncovered by the SBA’s own Inspector General, the GAO and virtually every television news channel such as NBC, CBS, ABC, RTTV, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and Fox News. Several journalists has published stories agreeing with me that there is a definite plan to quietly close the SBA by combining it with the Department or Commerce or by raising small business size standards to such a high level that federal small business programs will essentially be dismantled and legitimate small businesses will be driven from the federal market place. My goal is to get enough information on the SBA under the Freedom of Information Act to get the FBI and the General Accounting Office to conduct a thorough investigation of the SBA to find the specific individuals that have been responsible for cheating American small businesses out of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal small business contracts for over 15 years. Thousands of people in Washington like Terry Sutherland think of they are automatically American heroes just because they were in the military. My goal is to educate all the flag waving Pentagon types that cheating the American people out of the trillions of dollars in federal contracts they should be receiving by law is anything but patriotic. Stories about fraud, waste and missing trillions at the Pentagon have become common. Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on September 10, 2001, when he described how America’s real enemies are not outside our borders, “The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.” My guess is even after Halloween is over Terry Sutherland is going to try and stay invisible. I’m going to continue to use the Freedom of Information Act to make sure Terry and everything at the SBA and the Pentagon are as transparent as possible. To view the full article, click here: https://shadowproof.com/2014/10/31/sba-spokesman-terry-sutherlands-halloween-costume-is-the-invisible-man/ |