COME HOME AMERICA: Enough is enough

COME HOME AMERICA
Enough is enough

WASHINGTON — A single red rose in hand, Karen Meredith leans over her
son's simple white stone marker at Arlington National Cemetery.

Tears fall before words.
It's her first visit since she buried 1st Lt. Kenneth Michael Ballard,
a fourth generation soldier, last fall.

Still fresh, like the soil churned behind her son's grave for another
row of dead, is her anger. Anger at the way the Pentagon refused her
sole wish when her son was killed by a sniper last May to photograph
his casket returning from Iraq.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4173.htm

Privatized U.S. Wars Bilking Taxpayer Billions
Government Has No Idea What Contractors Are Doing
http://www.billslinksandmore.com/Billsblog/2009/06/12/privatized-us-wars-bi
lking-taxpayer-billions/

Not that this is in any way surprising, but the first report to
Congress from the Wartime Contracting Commission reportedly presents
bleak asssessments of how taxpayers have been bilked out of billions
of dollars — that’s in addition to the $23 billion that has already
been reportedly lost, stolen or is unaccounted for in Iraq — that have
recurringly been misused or lost due to fraud, poor management, weak
or non-existent oversight and a failure to learn from past mistakes.

Private contractors account for practically half of the U.S. personnel
involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Billions of dollars have
been lost due to waste, fraud and abuse. If it sounds familiar, it’s
because poor management and weak or non-existent oversight has been
the modus operandi in Washington for the past eight plus years and
corrupted cronyism has prevailed. The Bush administration’s illegal
occupation of Iraq created quite a war profiteering racket for
numerous Bush administration cronies. Cronyism is still big in U.S.
politics — President Obama has used it regularly too.

The decision to build a $30 million dining hall at a U.S. base in
Iraq, which is scheduled to be finished on Christmas of this year, was
based on bad planning and botched paperwork. Construction on the
dining hall can’t stop because the project is too far along to halt
it.

In addition to the documented poor management and weak oversight, the
111-page Wartime Contracting Commission report details how tens of
billions of dollars have been misspent since 2001. That’s not at all
surprising since the U.S. reliance on contractors to support two
illegal wars has grown to ‘unprecedented proportions.’


Government Has No Idea What Contractors Are Doing

According to the MSNBC article, more than 240,000 private sector
employees currently support military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Thousands more work for the U.S. State Department and the
U.S. Agency for International Development.

In keeping with tradition, the Pentagon hasn’t provided enough trained
staff to watch over the contractors and the government has no central
database of who the contractors are, what services they provide or how
much they’re paid — which is quite a contrast to the central databases
created to maintain data obtained from performing illegal surveillance
on U.S. citizens. More governmental waste was created because the
government has no idea of what contractors are doing.

Based on President Obama’s decision to increase the presence of U.S.
troops in Afghanistan, new bases will be built and existing bases will
be expanded without proper oversight, which will end up costing
taxpayers more money. Shoddy construction from contractors can be
found in Iraq and Afghanistan.

KBR Linked To Several Deficiencies

KBR Inc., one of former Vice President Cheney’s cronies has been the
primary contractor in Iraq, being paid nearly $32 billion since 2001.
Billions of that has ended up wasted because of poorly defined work
orders, the lack of adequate oversight and because of inefficiencies
with KBR.

KBR has been linked to several of the deficiencies found in Iraq,
including the dining hall snafu mentioned above, but the commission
faulted the military’s planning for that too.

A dining facility at Camp Delta was badly needed because it was too
small, had a saggy ceiling, poor lighting and an unsanitary wooden
floor and the Army said a new dining facility was needed in July 2008.
KBR was handed the contract for a new dining facility in September
2008. It turns out the existing Camp Delta dining facility had just
finished being renovated by KBR in June 2008 for the price of $3.36
million.

Because paperwork was never updated and the need for the project was
never reviewed after the security agreement was signed, KBR is being
paid for the same project again, after shoddily building it the first
time. The commission urged commanders in Iraq to thoroughly review all
construction and improvement projects and only continue those that are
essential to the life, health and safety of U.S. troops.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is intimately involved with
Haliburton and KBR, which explains why so many expensive no-bid
contracts have been awarded to them, as well as why little has been
done about all the fraud they perpetrated.

KBR, formerly a Haliburton subsidiary, has been linked to the ‘vast
majority’ of war-zone fraud with 32 cases of suspected overbilling,
bribery and other violations since 2004. KBR is also under fire for a
scandal involving the electrocution deaths of more than a dozen
soldiers as a result of faulty electrical work — for which they were
paid more than $80 million in bonuses. More information on the
fraudulent privatization of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can
be found in this article by Jeremy Scahill.

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