dagblog - Comments for "Memorial Day: A Time for Honor... And Shame"

acanuck - The Vanity Fair

Larry Jankens — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:54:14 +0000

acanuck - The Vanity Fair article is absolutely enraging. I concure that it is definitely worth the read. Check this quote, it encapsulates the shameful acts of these folks.

"Regardless of the war, the administration, or the various sophistries for expending human lives as a matter of government policy, profiteering from it universally offends all citizens, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, other parties or no shows. Most Americans, regardless of party or ideology, want to believe that any government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” as once put forth by Abraham Lincoln, necessarily must dispense the people’s business and money in a fair, honest and accessible way. As a “developed” democracy, for decades we have established extensive, government procurement processes to ostensibly ensure such full and open bidding for contracts.

But of course the street reality is much worse. And unfortunately, despite political rhetoric and platitudes about “competitive bidding,” the indisputable fact is that in Iraq and Afghanistan and the entire, massive Defense budget, those companies winning the largest, most lucrative government contracts have been consistently among the most politically influential in Washington. They have expended millions of dollars to hire former Pentagon officials, to finance federal campaigns, to lobby the legislative processes. We are supposed to believe it is merely coincidental that the recidivist recipients of U.S. contracts, some of whom have committed fraud, price fixing or other abuses in the documented past, also just happen to be those who have most greased the skids in our nation’s capital."

Charles Lewis, the founder and executive director of the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity

I highly recommend the

acanuck — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:32:19 +0000

In reply to Larry, the pattern of waste

I highly recommend the article you link to at the top of item 3, "The Case of the Missing Billions." It makes me mad, no matter whose money was being tossed away.

Larry, the pattern of waste

acanuck — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:29:37 +0000

In reply to Memorial Day: A Time for Honor... And Shame

Larry, the pattern of waste and graft you outline in your three examples is so blatant, so egregious, it's impossible to blame it on incompetence. Consider that the people who lined up to so profitably run the Iraq occupation were basically the same people who had pushed hardest for the Iraq War.

So why the deliberate waste? There's the obvious reason: the more unaccountable funding pushed through the pipeline, the more there would be to skim and scam a share of -- some through pseudo-legal cost-plus contracts, far more through outright fraud.

But the last-ditch money flights just as the Coalition Provisional Authority was about to hand over "sovereignty" to the Iraqis suggests something even more sinister. That last $5 billion or so -- hundreds of tons of bills, on shrink-wrapped pallets, virtually shoveled off the backs of pickup trucks -- was money that belonged to Iraq. The CPA (and the Pentagon, State Dept. and White House) made a deliberate decision to "spend" the last of Iraq's remaining reserves held on U.S. soil before the Iraqis were in a position to decide for themselves how, whether and where to spend it.

That decision effectively bankrupted the infant Iraqi regime, cementing its dependence on both the U.S. military and the contractors and consultants it had brought along for the ride. "Hey, you're now broke, but we'll rebuild your oil infrastructure in exchange for long-term access to the oil that you now need so desperately to sell." Was the Bush administration that cynical, that manipulative, that in the pocket of KBR, Halliburton and Big Oil? Do you really need to ask?