Op-Ed: Iraq Reconstruction Contracts, A Scandal for the Ages

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The examples are numerous and each more frightening then the other. They are such that they will shake your confidence in the American government, in the Iraq reconstruction efforts and in the good will of the “free world”.

A Rolling Stone article, featured in their latest issue, discusses the extent of the situation, and dramatically uncovers what many ignore, that corruption in Iraq is systemic and even encouraged by the White House.

Dummy vendors, double billing, time purposefully wasted, pyramidal sub-contracting, destruction of materials and millions of dollars unaccounted for are only some of the results of this controversial war.

Mainly to blame is “cost-plus” contracting which has lead to more money wasted then anyone could imagine. Created as one big exception to standard contract awarding, this method sees firms receiving a percentage of all moneys spent.

However, many have taken advantage of the situation, inflating expenses or hiring unqualified staff that cannot perform the job in a timely manner – in order to boost personal profits.

Here is one striking example. One of these firms, made up of a pair of ex-Army officers and bottom-rank Republicans, Scott Custer and Mike Battles. Battles had run for Congress in Rhode Island and had been a Fox News commentator, points out the Rolling Stone article.

The men threw together a security company in the hopes of grabbing a profitable contract to assure civilian security at the Baghdad airport.

Their bid looked "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later," said Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army. “The two simply presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."

“They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. […] According to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled.”

“In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax¬payers as new equipment.” Incredible and unfortunately this event is only one of many.

Another example is former Air Force civil engineer Earnest O. Robbins, who had been responsible of overseeing contract awards for the entire Air Force. The man, then hoping to do business with the reconstruction of Iraq had won a bid to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility meant to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits.

“But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but […] useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of sub-par plumbing in the upper floors,” reports the article.

But what is stranger is the Bush administration’s decision not to prosecute the two men, despite hard evidence of their fraud. The government’s argument: the men had defrauded the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and not the American government itself.

This position was later supported by the judge in the case and saw both man walk free, still carrying fraudulently earned cash in their pocket.

This despite the fact that it was appointed by the US Government and was funded at a level of $12 billion, in actual cash, shipped to be stored in Baghdad – this money suddenly seemed unimportant to the Bush administration.

Stored in palaces and watched by a lone soldier, these cash wads were practically free for the taking.

“When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he'd withdrawn,” explains the Rolling Stone.

“The office of the head of the CPA acknowledged not having any supporting documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. […] Some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find.”

"Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."

And how can anyone expect proper financial supervision when those responsible for awarding contracts for Iraq’s reconstruction are Republican partisans, and who promote only other Republican friends.

“In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O'Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense,” explains the Rolling Stone.

“O'Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron's moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides.”

This leads me to believe that this is an elaborate scheme for kickbacks to the Republican Party coffers. While their friends are getting rich on taxpayers’ dime, some of these grateful recipients eagerly donated what could be some of these earnings back to the party.

For example, Mike Battles from the Custer Battles Security company is shown as having donated $10,000 to the Republican State Committee of Massachusetts in September 2004, in what we can only assume was recognition for the profitable contract awarded to the makeshift company.

Classic republican back scratching… Careless profiteering and manipulation on the American people, all for republican profit. It makes me sick.