THE UNITED STATES’ Department of Defence (DoD) has been rocked by revelations that a 2006 nationwide investigation showed that more than 250 employees at the Pentagon had bought images of child pornography – but that most were never investigated.

An investigation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agenc (called ‘Project Flicker’) identified more than 5,000 people who had subscribed to websites showing child porn.

Project Flicker showed that credit cards or PayPal accounts belonging to 264 DoD employees were used to buy the illegal material, which included nine people who had “top secret sensitive compartmentalised information” – the top rank of codeword clearance for security staff.

Documents have now emerged, however, that only 52 of the suspects were investigated by the Pentagon’s internal investigation service – and only ten were ever issued with charges.

Furthermore, because the internal investigation service is deemed to have other investigative priorities, the project has been deemed “finished” and no further investigations are likely to take case.

While some may have had their charges taken up by local police authorities in their various locales, the bulk of those found to have been viewing the illegal material will not have had their military careers affected.

The documents, obtained and published by Yahoo! News’s ‘The Upshot’ blog, however, do show that 212 people on the list were never investigated at all. The blog also says it understands there was no thorough effort to inform superiors that their employees had been viewing the material.