The Rip-off in Iraq: You Will Not Believe How Low the War Profiteers Have Gone

[marmar]

from Rolling Stone, via AlterNet:


The Rip-off in Iraq: You Will Not Believe How Low the War Profiteers Have Gone

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted August 30, 2007.


In Iraq, private contractors are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.


How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed 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 one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/60950/

[underpants]

1. I highly rcommend this read

You probably already know some of it but some of it is new. Great writing and a great read.

[izzie]

2. I recall this. The US gave a contract to fix a bridge in the millions

where as the Iraq people had said they could fix it for about a 10 th of the cost and had built the bridge in the first place so knew what it was about. I have never under stood not giving the people of Iraq the job of rebuilding what we bombed as they live in that part of the world and knew how to do it. Also it would have put people to work. I have even read they they must get their cement from over seas co. Now the place that made cement for many thousands of years that is pretty silly. This has been a rip off from the day Bush got into office. It all comes down from the top. Just like the USA to think they can do every thing better after all we have been around 200 years where Iraq had been around for about 7000 years running many cities. Oh well who am I to bitch about what the 'brains' in the DOD and the WH do? I should just get in line and say any thing Bush does is good and right.