Isaiah J. Poole is the executive editor of TomPaine.com.
Almost unnoticed, the Department of Justice on Tuesday announced the formation of an investigative task force to sniff out and prosecute fraud. The task force’s quarry is fraud associated with “contracting activity for national security and other government programs.” Yes, that creaking sound you hear is that of a barn door closing as the horses, ridden by newly enriched war profiteers, make their getaway.
The federal government could have put serious accountability mechanisms in place years ago, when they made the fateful decision to invade Iraq and then put the reconstruction effort under the control of a handful of corporate titans. They did not, and we now are all too familiar with the consequences. While officials of such key companies of Halliburton have reaped record paychecks as a result of their getting billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts for Iraqi reconstruction, the reconstruction itself has been a massive disaster. Average Iraqi citizens have less access to electricity, gasoline and other basic services than they did when Saddam Hussein was in power. Meanwhile, as Los Angeles Times reporter T. Christian Miller has documented in his book on Iraq contracting abuses, Blood Money, billions in taxpayer money have never been properly accounted for and perhaps never will be. And, as he wrote Wednesday for The Huffington Post, “Not a single corporate executive or government contracting officer has faced the music in any of these cases.”
“It’s a Potemkin reform,” said Charlie Cray, director of the Center for Corporate Policy. “These guys have had every opportunity for the past few years to do something about it, and now all of the conversation has been about Republican pedophiles and they all of a sudden want to talk about what great oversight they are doing.”
The Justice Department announcement, of course, doesn’t even broach the flat-out incompetence that characterized the reconstruction. As just one example, take the new police academy building in Baghdad built by the Parsons Corp. under a $75 million contract. The House Government Reform Committee learned last month that the construction work on that building was so poor that human waste seeped from the plumbing through the walls.
The Army Corps of Engineers just recently canceled that contract and others in the company’s Iraq work portfolio worth about $2 billion. Nevertheless, Parsons is at the same time getting a five-year, $15 million deal from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command to provide master planning for Navy and Marine Corps facilities in much of the world. That’s right: A contractor with a track record of failure in Iraq is getting yet more contracts.
Even the contractors’ campaign contributions can’t shield their Republican benefactors from embarrassment over their abysmal performance. Hence, even Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, R-Va., chairman of the Government Reform Committee—who according to the Center for Responsive Politics has received $143,530 of the $1.8 million he has raised for his re-election from defense-related interests—was sharply critical at the late September hearing. While acknowledging that the perilous security conditions in Iraq exponentially increase the difficulty and cost of reconstruction projects, “a challenging security environment cannot excuse otherwise avoidable problems and preventable waste. … According to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, we keep spending more and building less because cost estimates are still inaccurate, reconstruction priorities and funding allocations keep shifting, and contractor performance is not being closely monitored.”
There is something more important than money at stake in this. As of Tuesday, 647 civilian employees of private contractors have died in Iraq, according to Reuters. Some of them have died allegedly as a result of defense contractor negligence. Certainly the families of six workers who died in an ambush of a truck convoy believed that they had a case against Kellogg, Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary they allege knowingly directed the convoy into an active battle zone where civilians should not have been directed. But last month a federal judge in Texas denied their wrongful death claim, on the basis that KBR was essentially acting as an extension of the Army and was thus beyond the reach of the liability that a private corporation normally has. The judge’s ruling, according to the lawyer for the family, T. Scott Allen, creates “a legal gray zone in which Halliburton and KBR can act in any manner they chose.”
That does not bode well for the families of four Blackwater Security workers who are also pursuing a wrongful death claim, alleging that the company was negligent in a 2004 incident in Falluja in which the contractors were shot and two of their bodies were filmed as they were hung from a bridge and burned.
On almost every level, the use of private contractors in Iraq has been a disaster. This week, concerned citizens around the country will use the Robert Greenwald documentary “Iraq for Sale” to stoke public outrage. The film draws on the testimonials of people who have been the witnesses and victims of contractor malfeasance. The Campaign For America’s Future is helping set up house parties where people can see the film and decide how they will respond. Organizing or attending a house party is a tangible way to make the issue of Iraq corruption a major one in next few weeks.
As the report the organization released last month on war profiteering in Iraq concludes, “The failure to plan and execute a sensible reconstruction in Iraq now leaves our soldiers stranded in a widening civil war, our allies dismayed and our enemies emboldened. Companies have profited from the Iraq fiasco. Profiteers have cashed in. But our country has been badly served. As citizens, we can’t provide oversight for the private contractors in Iraq. But we can hold our leaders accountable.”
Accountability could take many forms, all of which the Bush administration has resisted. Reforms similar to those that congressional Democrats have sought to put into law have been blocked by Republicans. Those reforms would mean that contractors guilty of fraud and malfeasance would be more quickly debarred or suspended and would face stiff penalties for war profiteering.
The scale of corruption and negligence—and its cost in human as well as financial terms—is such that whispering about a task force in a press release is not enough. Both the Bush administration and the Congress need to feel the wrath of an enraged electorate demanding accountability.
