Auditors tell Congress: Billions squandered in Iraq
More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable or unsupported.
Go to original by HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – About $10 billion has been squandered by the U.S. government on
Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses, and federal investigators warned Thursday that significantly more taxpayer money is at risk.
The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.
More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable or unsupported, nearly triple the amount of waste the Government Accountability Office estimated last fall.
“There is no accountability,” said David M. Walker, who heads the auditing arm of Congress. “Organizations charged with overseeing contracts are not held accountable. Contractors are not held accountable. The individuals responsible are not held accountable.”
“People should be rewarded when they do a good job. But when things don’t go right, there have to be consequences,” he said.
A few months ago, I read Richard Slotkin’s book “Lost Battalions” about heroic immigrant and Black battalions that fought in WWI and WWII, when the notion was that such men would not make good soldiers.
One of the points Slotkin made about the propaganda “ramp up” to both wars is that a lot of effort went into making sure that munitions vendors were not “war profiteers”. The elites realized that they’d have to support a popular draft to raise a vast citizen army and that mothers were not going to send their boys over there if the purpose of the exercise was perceived as committing their sons to be cannon fodder for corrupt arms salesmen.
In WWII and Korea too, IIRC, there were congressional investigations and presidential involvement in having auditing defense contracts to wring out excess profits, kickbacks, corruption and the like.
With the current administration, it seems quite the opposite, especially where so much of the planning and operations of these wars seem to be outsourced to defense contractors.