It's like Shangri-La for the corrupt. "Kid in a candy store" doesn't even do it justice; kids at least have parents telling them "no." But for a politically connected contractor in Iraq ... whew, these are the salad days.
Not only do you get to charge whatever you want, not only do you sometimes get paid in cool-looking bricks of millions of dollars worth of crisp American currency, but if you actually committed fraud and demonstrable corruption? You are off scot-free.
And, best of all, the ruling party in the world's only super-power: it's got your back. Follow me below the flip for a story I'm surprised didn't get more attention on the blogs, what I plan to do about it, and, at the end, an action alert on how you can help ...
Mind-boggling Corruption
First, let's go back a bit and talk about the case of Custer Battles. That's a company that got some contracting to do work in Iraq under the CPA, originally. Then, they got busted, with a couple of whistle-blowers detailing schemes that included shell companies in the Caymans, over-charging, painting old Iraqi forklifts they found and leasing them to the US government as their own, and many other abuses. Here's a Newsweek story:
Yet when the two whistle-blowers sued Custer Battles on behalf of the U.S. government--under a U.S. law intended to punish war profiteering and fraud--the Bush administration declined to take part. "The government has not lifted a finger to get back the $50 million Custer Battles defrauded it of," says Alan Grayson, a lawyer for the two whistle-blowers, Pete Baldwin and Robert Isakson. [...]
Why hasn't the administration joined the case? It has argued privately that the occupation government, known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, was a multinational institution, not an arm of the U.S. government. So the U.S. government was not technically defrauded [...] "I'll bet you $50 they will not show up," says Richard Sauber, a lawyer for Custer Battles, which is still operating in Iraq.
Before we move on, I want to draw attention to that last sentence. They are still in Iraq! And the arrogance of the lawyer, the fact that he was so sure the government wouldn't show up, it's very interesting. Also, the administration arguing the technicality there ... remember that.
At first, the plaintiffs won the suit and Custer Battles was forced to pay $10 million in fines. Then ... well, let's fast forward to last week and let TPMmuckraker take up the story:
On Friday, though, a judge overturned the decision because he said it hadn't adequately been demonstrated that the CPA was an arm of the U.S. government. It was "principally controlled" and funded by billions in U.S. taxpayer money, yes, but "this degree of control did not rise to the level of exclusive control required to qualify as an instrumentality of the U.S. government," the judge wrote in his opinion. Because "it was created through and governed by multinational consent," U.S. taxpayers can't get any of their money back from war profiteers.
So the judge gave the exact same reasoning the administration was arguing "privately." What a coincidence!
But look at the effect of this: Iraq contractors are completely above the law. They can't be sanctioned for anything in the courts in this country. And what they have done is truly mind-boggling in the amount of sheer corruption that has just run rampant through the entire enterprise. From The Guardian:
Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11m and $26m worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work. Some $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for "personnel not in the field performing work" and "other improper charges" on just one oil pipeline repair contract.
At the same time, the IAMB discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. "The only reason you wouldn't monitor them is if you don't want anyone else to know how much is going through," one petroleum executive told me.
It's not just sheer corruption; there's sheer war profiteering as well. Tammy Duckworth, running for Congress in Illinois, has reported that when she was in Iraq, some units couldn't sand-bag their own facilities because Halliburton had the "sand-bagging contract". The gall of those very words stops me for a moment. Halliburton would pay locals pennies to do that and charge the US Government (in other words ... you and me) for a full labor rate.
And all of this while the soldiers, the poor kids in the Army and Marines, the older soldiers in the Guard and Reserve, all of them got paid little to walk around in a war zone, sometimes without adequate body armor and driving un-armored Humvees. For a veteran like me, it's especially infuriating.
And the Republican government has actively blocked all efforts at investigating this in any way.
The committees responsible in the House, especially the Armed Services Committee on which my opponent (John McHugh) sits, have, to my knowledge, not held a single hearing on this matter. Every attempt at even holding hearings gets bottled up in the Rules Committee in the House. The corruption is so obvious and blatant, and the efforts to block looking into it so complete, it's hard not to get the feeling that it's deliberate.
We can fight back
So, I'm making a central part of my campaign a call for a new Truman Committee to investigate all manner of war profiteering and corruption, modeled on the famous Truman Committee of World War II. There have been efforts on this in the past, most notably in the House John Tierney's (D-MA) effort to introduce legislation establishing this type of committee (co-sponsored, it should be noted with true respect, by Jim Leach, R-IA, as well as about three dozen Democrats, iirc), efforts that met with a party-line dismissal (with the lone exception being Mr. Leach). Tammy Duckworth and Jim Webb have also announced support for the idea in this election session, and there have been efforts in the Senate.
Today I am calling on all Democrats to loudly join in this effort, to make this an important part of this election season. I will be working with the other Democrats running in the districts surrounding mine to convince them of this. This is too important (and, frankly, too potent politically) to be ignored. This is the purest expression of a government completely run amok, with absolutely no concern for the soldiers, no concern for our money, no concern for doing the job right. We can't get so caught up in the right-wing led argument of "what would Democrats do in Iraq?" that we forget the basic function of Congress: oversight. To that question, we can answer: we'll look for the truth and clean up the parts of the mess that we can clean up. And work to put a Democrat in the White House in '08 so we can begin to clean up the rest.
Sure, there will be opposition; Ike knew what he was about when he warned of the military-industrial complex. But sometimes, people just go too far, and all decent people need to stand up and say, "Enough." And, in this case, things are so blatant and wrong that I believe--in fact, I'm sure--Americans will be with us. We can stand up and demand accountability.
So, I'm asking for a few things from you, the community I'm happy to be a part of now: first, please write letters to the editors of the daily papers on my district. They can be short, just mentioning your concern over this issue and mentioning my support for a new Truman Committee. It'll help enormously to get this issue on the radar, and, as I said in my diary last week, it's difficult to pressure the media here to break the silence on this campaign. You can submit one to the Plattsburgh paper here, or do an e-mail distribution to that paper (letters@pressrepublican.com), the Syracuse Post-Standard (letters@syracuse.com) and the Watertown Daily Times (letters@wdt.net).
Secondly, please contact your local Democratic representatives and/or candidates and tell them of your concern over this problem and call of them to make this a major issue. A big hurdle we face politically is the feeling among Independents that "they're all the same" and "Democrats won't do anything differently." If we all speak with one voice on this issue, we can demonstrate that, yes, Democrats will do something differently.
Because spending money wisely is not a partisan issue. Because making sure people follow the rules is not a partisan issue. Because not undermining court cases brought against corruption ... that's not a partisan issue.
This Congress has abandoned its responsibility for oversight. Why - because they are afraid of what they will find. The Republicans have failed us all, they have given up the basic duties of government in a bonanza of corruption. This Congress has abandoned its responsibility for oversight. Why - because they are afraid of what they will find. It's time we called them on it, put the case to the people in a way that is easy to understand, and ended this disastrous experiment in extreme right-wing governance.
{I'm Bob Johnson and I'm running against do-nothing GOP foot-soldier John McHugh in New York's 23rd district. Contributions and volunteers accepted from all over the country ... you don't need to be in my district to volunteer}