« Where's Obama? | Main | JUST DON'T PANIC! »
May 07, 2008
WAR PROFITEERING RAMPANT Says Senator
Posted by Jack
Starting April 28th, 2008 the Senate's Democratic Policy Committee has been holding a series of hearings to investigate contracting abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Dorgan said today this should be about accountability, not partisanship. If the taxpayers are getting hosed then we need to find out who is doing it and put them in jail. I agree and I'm glad Dorgan feels this way. The waste, fraud and abuse, according to Dorgan and many others, are compromizing our troops and stalling their mission.
Among the many cases he is investigating is the selling of unclean water to the Army that had twice the bacteria level of Euphrates river that runs through Baghdad. The contractor allegedly skipped the decontamination process outlined in his contract. The Army and Haliburton first denied these claims, however evidence has since turned up that soldiers were becoming sick and then whistle blowers confirm it really happened. In 2005 Dr. Shah Alam, Gulf Region South District program manager in Iraq had this to say, “The nice thing about it is there is a real need for the clinic program and it feels good to know that something good is coming to the people,” The clinics were allocated $1.4 million each and today the money is gone, and there is only a handful of clinics built.
Dorgan said, "Contractors use burn pits to destroy old equipment and keep it off the black market or out of insurgents' hands. The whistleblowers will testify that virtually new equipment, even vehicles, are being burned and that the pits have turned into a source of theft, where insiders can access equipment for illegal sale. "
From Executive Government.com, "Dorgan is chairman of the committee, which has held 12 such hearings since December 2003 and is ramping up for more in a renewed push to form a select investigative committee on Iraq and Afghanistan contracting.
A bipartisan select committee with subpoena power is crucial to investigating "the most significant government waste, fraud and abuse in the nation's history," he said. Dorgan cited the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, chaired by then-Sen. Harry Truman, as an example of what he hopes to accomplish. That committee is credited with saving the government $15 billion between 1941 and 1948 by exposing wasteful and corrupt military contractors.
"Most of our [Senate] committees are not equipped to fully investigate," Dorgan said. "We don't have the investigators and ... it's more properly done in a bipartisan select committee."
Dorgan has introduced legislation to create the select committee three times on the Senate floor, but has been unable to gain the 60 votes necessary to pass the proposal.
The policy committee hearings thus far have featured primarily whistleblowers. On April 28, three former contractor employees will testify, including two from KBR Inc., which provides myriad support services to the military. They will detail instances of overcharging, double-billing, fraud and theft by U.S. contractors in Iraq, according to Dorgan.
The committee has struggled to get company executives or agency officials to testify at the almost exclusively Democratic hearings. The committee has extended invitations to the heads of Halliburton as well as to Pentagon officials, but they have "decided not to show up," he said.
Before we went to war, President Bush and other senior Administration officials made three promises to the American people: (1) we would find weapons of mass destruction; (2) we would be welcomed as liberators; and (3) the reconstruction of Iraq would pay for itself. How did that work out?
WANT TO READ MORE?
ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.
Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.
The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors' pockets, records show.
Posted by Post Scripts at May 7, 2008 10:08 AM