The Intercept released a rather strange report this weekend involving Pentagon activity on the continent of Africa and an apparent lack of congressional oversight for such activities. And by “activity” I don’t mean the occasional jeep getting lost or some peacekeeping troops being ambushed by snipers. We apparently have entire military bases in Africa that haven’t been reported to Congress. I realize that probably sounds crazy to some of you, but it’s apparently not nearly as close to impossible as we might have thought. And our troops at those “enduring” forward operating sites under the control of U.S. Africa Command have been up to all sorts of interesting activities. For example, you may have recently heard about a junta in Niger this summer that overthrew the government and ousted its president. Would you be surprised to learn that we trained the military participants in the junta that did it? I know I was.

Since a cadre of U.S.-trained officers joined a junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president in late July, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been largely confined to their Nigerien outposts, including America’s largest drone base in the region, Air Base 201 in Agadez.

The base, which has cost the U.S. a total of $250 million since construction began in 2016, is the key U.S. surveillance hub in West Africa. But in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of U.S. Africa Command described Air Base 201 as “minimal” and “low cost.”

Gen. Michael Langley, the AFRICOM chief, told Congress about just two “enduring” U.S. forward operating sites in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and a longtime logistics hub on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic Ocean.

The events in Niger really do paint a picture of the level of secrecy that had to be involved. Literally hours before the junta began, American diplomats were reporting to members of Congress that Niger’s government and democracy, while imperfect, were in decent shape and were “among the more stable in the region,” according to NBC News. The following day the President was behind bars and the military said it would prosecute him for treason. He was also reportedly running out of food in captivity.

But as I suggested above, there is a lot more going on here than just some secret training programs. The head of U.S. Africa Command has apparently been hiding plenty from Congress. In testimony before Congress this year, Gen. Michael Langley described the base where the Niger fighters were trained as being “minimal” and “low cost.” (I suppose that might be true if you consider a quarter of a billion dollars “low cost” for a forward operating post.) When he described the two “forward operating sites” we have in Africa (Camp Lemonnier and a logistics hub on Ascension Island) he left out a few other details.

It turns out that we have no fewer than 18 other operating posts around the continent, some of them of considerable size and durability. We also operate a longtime drone base in Tunisia, along with others used to conduct “shadow wars” in both Niger and Tunisia that never seem to make it into the news. But they apparently don’t show up in Pentagon reports to Congress because of linguistic tricks such as classifying them as only being “semi-permanent” or even “temporary” even if they’ve been operating for years.

You may find yourself wondering how in the world the Pentagon could hide something the size and cost of a military base. Perhaps it’s not as tricky as we might have imagined when you consider that it’s the only federal agency that has never once passed an audit, despite such independent audits being required by law. They regularly lose track of money in figures approaching the billions, or at least they claim to lose track. They’ve been up to plenty of other things that they simply don’t let Congress know about, and I’m not just talking about all of the UFO stuff. We honestly have no idea how much they’ve been hiding.

This is just the latest example of why we need increased transparency and accountability from virtually every facet of the government and we need new leaders who will lead the way in making changes and demanding that accountability. The Pentagon has either been lying about any number of things or they are too incompetent to be trusted. (Most likely a combination of a lot of both.) The Justice Department, DHS, and the intelligence agencies are no better. And in too many cases, they aren’t just lying to the American people, which we sadly should be used to by now, but they can’t even be trusted to tell the truth to Congress and submit themselves to proper oversight as defined in the Constitution. It’s time for a massive housecleaning, and if we don’t get one, this country is toast, plain and simple.