Crossposted from SmokeyMonkey.org.
Well, in the course of my news-reading day, I stumbled across this article in the BBC. The article is not very good, and it struck me that I have read seemingly the same story several times in the last year. I began to wonder if the report mentioned was new. Googling turned up over half a million hits for "us audit iraq reconstruction" (no quotes in the search)! Reluctant to get involved in a lengthy research, I began to open some links. It seems my impression was correct. This has been in the news for quite some time.
So has it been missed? I checked for some DailyKos tags that would point to similar efforts that I am about to undertake. I checked for SIGIR, IAMB, DFI, and CPA before I found anything. Under CPA there are a few articles from last fall. The Iraq tag is a bit hard to search with over 3000 diaries attached. In other words, I can't really find where any summary of this scandal has been posted to DailyKos.com. Where I found relevent articles, I have linked them below.
If there is a summary to this story, I would love to see it. There is a depth of meat here. There are ties to all sorts of other scandals, the corruption, the cronyism, KBR, mercenaries, torture. This is just one more scandal to throw on the bonfire, but I'll throw all the fuel on the 2006 election fire that I can!
I want to do this in a timeline format, as that is easier for me to organize:
PBS, March 20, 2003: The Iraq War begins. There is little to add to this, I think.
White House Press Release, May 1, 2003: Mission Accomplished. Go get your own pictures!
Some time passes, during which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under Paul Bremer begins reconstruction of Iraq by taking remaining funds from Oil for Food Program plus appropriated funds from the US government and creating the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF). Also, the Development Fund of Iraq was created out of oil revenues and international aid. It is these funds that we are talking about in this diary.
Boston Globe, October 16, 2004, regarding October 14, 2004 audit reports from IAMB.
About half of the roughly $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds disbursed by the US government in the first half of this year cannot be accounted for, according to an audit commissioned by the United Nations, which could not find records for numerous rebuilding projects and other payments.
One chunk of the money -- $1.4 billion -- was deposited into a local bank by Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq but could be tracked no further: The auditors reported that they were shown a deposit slip but could find no additional records to explain how the money was used or to prove that it remains in the bank.
That's a big Kurdish payoff! Thanks for staying out of the way while we took over the rest of the country!
On June 28, 2004, the CPA handed control of Iraq to the Interim Government. On October 29, 2004, the CPA's Inspector General officially became the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR).
CNN, January 31, 2005, regarding January 30, 2005 audit report from SIGIR.
Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.
The $8.8 billion was reported to have been spent on salaries, operating and capital expenditures, and reconstruction projects between October 2003 and June 2004, Bowen's report concluded.
"CPA staff identified at one ministry that although 8,206 guards were on the payroll, only 602 guards could be validated," the audit report states. "Consequently, there was no assurance funds were not provided for ghost employees."
The last is a well-used figure. It comes from page 7-8 of the January 30, 2005 SIGIR Audit Report. It gives as example at least one other ministry where a similar situation was found. It goes on to say:
However, when the CPA staff recommended the Iraqi Ministry of Finance require certified payrolls prior to salary payments, CPA Ministry of Finance personnel stated the CPA would rather overpay salaries than risk not paying employees and inciting violence.
Good, we don't want to payoff the Kurds and not payoff the Shi'a as well. Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, the Iraqi government is ethnically diverse right?
CorpWatch, April 22, 2005, regarding April 20, 2005 audit report from SIGIR.
U.S. investigators have criticized Aegis Defence Services Ltd. for its work providing security in Iraq for contractors and U.S. government staff, saying the British firm had failed to verify that employees were properly qualified for the job.
Surely you know the wonderful folks at Aegis from this little incident, which made the news and the blogs more easily than this 'wasting' money stuff. But here is what Aegis did long before that:
In a sample of 20 records of 125 Iraqis employed by Aegis, six had not been interviewed, 18 had not had police checks and no records existed at all for two of them. "According to Aegis managers, police checks are difficult to obtain and largely irrelevant to the vetting process because of the current dysfunctional state of the Iraqi government," the audit said.
'Largely irrelevant'? Being a dysfunctional government does not justify government sanctioned torture. Let's just give them all guns and money and let 'em kill one another, right? We still get to cash in on the contract. So what is the purpose of mercenary armies?
The U.S. government hoped better coordination would make contractors more secure and enable more reconstruction work to be done.
This has clearly not worked out in any way, shape, or form. First of all, according to icasualties.org, 309 contractors have been killed in Iraq dating back to April, 2003. Also, reconstruction funds for electricity and water have been shifted to security. In the following graph, these are first three respective categories.
SeattleTimes, July 4, 2005, and The Guardian, July 7, 2005, regarding April 30, 2005 audit reports from SIGIR.
On the streets of Baghdad, U.S. military commanders began complaining early that the money rarely seemed to trickle down. "We're losing the peace," a frustrated U.S. Special Forces Maj. Robert Caffrey said in June 2003 as Iraq teetered between the euphoria of seeing Saddam toppled and frustration at a U.S. occupation that seemed to bring no benefits. At the time, Caffrey was furious that he could get no money to foster local government or pay for small clean-up projects and schools.
Cathy Mann, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said questions are "part of the normal contracting process" to be expected in a war zone. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Marine Lt. Col. Rose-Ann Lynch, said the Defense Department "is committed to an integrated, well-managed contracting process in Iraq."
I agree with her because it is obvious that if you are spending time burning the skin off of children that electricity and water would tend to be secondary.
Finally, WashingtonPost, November 5, 2005, regarding September 30, 2005 audit reports from IAMB.
A U.N.-established international auditing board called on the United States to repay Iraq $208 million in disputed fees for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary.
Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann maintains that KBR fairly incurred the costs cited in the Pentagon audit and said that it would be wrong to imply that the company overcharged for its services. "The costs questioned in the SIGIR report are just that -- questioned costs," she wrote in an e-mail.
Given that even Bremer is now writing out against the administration, not only have we driven our deficits off the chart with the extreme cost of the war, but we can rest assured that our officials over there are just as corrupt and wasteful with money as the bastards we have here. AND, and, as if corruption and bribery aren't enough, there is a factor of utter incompetence here as well. Most of the 'questioned' moneys that have been discussed above are 'missing' because there is simply no paper trail to follow. Bundles of $100 bills have simply vanished; bank accounts drained with zero accounting; ghost employees; and, of course, Halliburton, Aegis, and other no-bid or rigged-bid contracts. I don't know about you, but I'm not really in need of any other scandals to talk about at this point. Maybe we could just go ahead and impeach now?
References
SIGIR (Special Invespector General for Iraq Reconstruction)
International Advisory and Monitoring Board
National Priorities Project