The Rag Blog

*Note: I use ground Thai chiles. Hot, hot !! And it always makes the coffee more exciting the next morning! I actually give the grinder a really careful wipe with paper towel.

“The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” — Winston Churchill

The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge governmental power of arrest and detention through the use of habeas corpus laws. Habeas corpus is roughly Latin for “hold the body,” and is used in law to mean that a government must either charge a person with a crime and allow them due process, or let them go free.

Last autumn the House and Senate passed, and the President signed into law The United States Military Commissions Act of 2006, which explicitly strips both aliens and Americans of the right of habeas corpus, the right of recourse to the courts (as provided in the Fifth through Eighth Amendments to the Constitution), and denies appeal through mechanisms of the Geneva Conventions to those designated to lose these rights by the President.

As the most conspicuous part of a series of laws which have fundamentally changed the nature of this nation, moving us from a democratic republic to a state under the rule of a “unitary” President, the Military Commissions Act should be immediately reversed. When a demi-tyrant like Vladimir Putin begins lecturing the United States, as he did just a few days ago, on how our various behaviors over the past five years have “nothing in common with democracy,” we should pay attention.

This attack on eight centuries of English law is no small thing. While the Republican’s (and 13 Democrats in the Senate) purported intent was to deny Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp detainees the right to see a civilian judge or jury, it could just as easily extend to you and me. (Already two American citizens have been arbitrarily stripped of their habeas corpus rights by the Bush administration – Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi – and there may be others.)

Section 9, Clause 2, of Article I of the United States Constitution says: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Alberto Gonzales testified on January 18th before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is [only] a prohibition against taking it away.”

While there are many countries in the world where all power and all rights are reserved to the government, and then doled out to the people by constitutional, legislative, or executive decree, the first three words of our Constitution clearly state who in this country holds all the power and all the rights: “We the People.”

Our Constitution does not grant us rights, because “We” already hold all rights. Instead, it defines the boundaries of our government, and identifies what privileges “We the People” will grant to that government.

When Gonzales suggested we have no habeas corpus rights because the Constitution doesn’t grant them, his testimony betrayed a breathtaking ignorance of the history and meaning of the United States Constitution. And, because his thinking probably reflects that of his superior, George W. Bush, Gonzales’ testimony demonstrates the urgency with which Congress must act to repeal the many laws, signing statements, and executive orders that have been issued by this administration.

But particularly, and first, with regard to habeas corpus.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president (on March 3, 1863) to suspend habeas corpus so he could imprison those he considered a threat until the war was over. Congress invoked this power again during Reconstruction when President Grant requested The Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871 to put down a rebellion in South Carolina. Those are the only two fully legal suspensions of habeas corpus in the history of the United States (and Lincoln’s is still being debated).

The United States hasn’t suffered a “Rebellion” or an “Invasion” since Lincoln’s and Grant’s administrations. There are no foreign armies on our soil, seizing our cities. No states or municipalities are seriously talking about secession. Yet the Attorney General says we have no rights to habeas corpus, and the Military Commissions Act now backs him up.

Fidel Castro is a hard core revolutionary, and what he said recently about the hanging of Saddam Hussein was pretty indicative of that. At eighty years old, gravely ill, and possibly on his death bed, Castro pledged that he wouldn’t go down the same way as Saddam. “That’s not the way to go,” he told his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chávez, with whom he maintains a close friendship. “If the Yankees ever invade, don’t go hide in a hole like Saddam,” he warned him. “If they ever invade Havana, I’ll be right on the front line waiting for them.”[1]

Just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Castro has endured almost half a century of U.S. aggressions, assassination attempts, and destabilization efforts. The recent documentary film “638 Ways to Kill Castro” documents the hundreds of different attempts on Castro’s life; explosive-laden cigars, hidden snipers, poisoned milk-shakes, a remote airplane with a bomb, bazookas, and grenade attacks. They very nearly succeeded once with a gun hidden in a video camera at a press conference, but the cameraman lost his nerve. Another time they tried to give Castro a poisoned scuba-diving suit, but he preferred his old one and never used it.

In a region of the world that is dominated by Washington, and where unwanted leaders have always been eliminated by either U.S. invasions, coups, or covert wars, Castro is still standing. Even when much of the world was saying that he was nearly dead, two weeks ago he appeared on television visiting with Hugo Chávez. After several operations, it appeared that his health situation has improved as he looked healthier than a few months ago.

The CIA strategies and manipulations have not been able to do with Castro what they have with nearly every other revolutionary leader in Latin America over the last century; Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Aristide in Haiti, to name a few. In Cuba, Castro’s communist revolution continues to be the path, and although there has always been a lot of controversy surrounding it, I’m told the Revolution isn’t going anywhere. Cuban friends tell me that Castro’s brother Raúl has taken over his position, and that most Cubans on the island still back the revolution.

It was, President Bush must have been thinking, a heck of a lot easier five years ago. Back in 2002, the president had a smoothly running lie factory humming along in the Pentagon, producing reams of fake intelligence about Iraq, led by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans. Back then, he had a tightly knit cabal of neoconservatives, led by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, based in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, to carry out a coordinated effort to distribute the lies to the media. And he had a chorus of yes-men in the Republican-controlled Congress ready to echo the party line.

In 2007, Bush stands nearly alone, and he never looked lonelier than during a bumbling, awkward news conference on the Iraq-Iran tangle Wednesday.

Feith is long gone, and last week his lie factory was exposed by the Pentagon’s own inspector general, who told Congress that Feith had pretty much made up everything that his rogue intelligence unit manufactured. Libby is long gone, apparently about to be sentenced to jail for lying about Cheney’s frantic effort to cover up the lie factory’s work. And the congressional echo chamber is gone: In six weeks, the Democrats have held more than four dozen hearings to investigate the White House’s catastrophic Middle East policy, and even Hillary Clinton is warning that Bush had better keep his hands off Iran, saying: “It would be a mistake of historical proportions if the administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran.”

Without his Orwellian apparatus behind him, the president spent most of his hour-long news conference yesterday shrugging and smirking, jutting his jaw out with false bravado, joshing inappropriately with reporters asking deadly serious questions and stumbling over his words. It was painful to listen to him trying to justify the nonsensical claims that Iran and its paramilitary “Quds Force” are somehow responsible for the chaos in Iraq:

What we do know is that the Quds force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. We know that. And we also know that the Quds force is a part of the Iranian government. That’s a known. What we don’t know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds force to do what they did.

Pressed about what the “head leaders” are doing, he went on:

Either they knew or didn’t know, and what matters is, is that they’re there. What’s worse, that the government knew or that the government didn’t know? … What’s worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and it happening?

The United States corporate television and newspaper media continue to ratchet up their daily barrage against the people and government of Venezuela. In the last two weeks, they have been attacking Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela over the recent Enabling Law, passed by the National Assembly on January 31, 2007. These attacks follow a formula, using perjurative innuendo, inflammatory language, half truths and outright lies. We say enough! Axis of Logic has taken a close look at one such corporate media attack, authored by one Brian Ellsworth (Reuters) and published in the Washington Post on February 13, 2007. We have dissected Ellsworth’s statements under the bright light of the facts about the new Enabling Law and it’s direct impact on the private corporations involved. Our factual analysis is contained within the Reuter’s article below.

Venezuela’s Chavez sets fast nationalization pace
By Brian Ellsworth
Reuters
Tuesday, February 13, 2007; 7:12 PM

Ellsworth: “CARACAS – Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is setting a faster than expected pace in his nationalization drive toward self-styled socialism, striking three takeover deals that push out U.S. firms in about a month.”

Axis of Logic: The corporate media is well-known now for it’s choice of negative terms to tilt the reader’s impressions about Venezuela and to create polarization beween U.S. citizens and the Venezuelan people. Venezuelan socialism is not “self-styled” as Ellsworth chooses to describe it. This is journalism speak. The form Venezuelan socialism will take will be decided by mass participation by the people in seminars and meetings. For example, seminars are now scheduled in Caracas and Valencia for Feb 15 to get the ball rolling. Chávez has stated that the economy will be mixed but all strategic industries – telecommunications, electricity, gas, oil, steel etc. will be taken over by the state and run in tandem with and by the workers. Ellsworth’s phrase “[to] push out U.S. firms in about a month” also suggests that Venezuelan socialism is primarily an affront to the U.S. rather than a new system designed to empower the working class in Venezuela and to strengthen the Venezuelan economy.

Ellsworth: “Chavez, an ally of Cuba who is vehemently opposed to what he sees as U.S. imperialism, is boosting state involvement in Venezuela, the No. 4 supplier of oil to the United States, as he consolidates power after a landslide re-election last year.”

Axis of Logic: Introducing Chávez as “an ally of Cuba” fits well with the tired, old charge that President Chávez is “turning Venezuela into another Cuba”. We’ve heard it over and over from the U.S.-backed wealthy minority during our visits to the country. It also reinforces the red-baiting indoctrination Washington and its corporate media have rained down on the population here for decades. This reference to Cuba is gratuitous on its face and has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of Ellsworth’s article. He writes that Chávez “consolidates power” following his “landslide re-election”. If he had read the new Enabling Law, he would have understood how the law consolidates power to the people and away from the private corporations.

Ellsworth: “Venezuelan authorities said on Tuesday they would buy the assets of U.S. power company CMS for $106 million, a day after cutting a similar deal with telecom giant Verizon for $572 million.

“Last week the government signed an accord to buy the holdings of U.S.-based global power generation firm AES Corp. for $750 million despite analysts’ predictions of protracted takeover battles.

” ‘The government has showed it’s clearly willing to move at a particularly fast pace to deliver on promises,’ said Patrick Esteruelas, an analyst with the Eurasia Group.”

The deals came two weeks after Chavez received special powers to rule by decree and five weeks after he vowed to nationalize the telecommunications and power utilities.

Judging from Al-Hayat’s news from Washington, there appears to be an important difference between two sides of new Iraq security plan, as far as the Americans are concerned, one focused directly on Baghdad security, and the other having to do with tracking down and publicizing anything that could be described as part of a arms-network traceable to Iran.

Al-Hayat quotes an impeccable source for a description of the second part, namely Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute. The reporter describes Donnelly as well-connected and as having given a lot of advice to Bush in preparation of the current plan. The reporter says:

[Donnelly said] the Bush administration [in the recent Iran-arms show] wanted to send a message to two parties, namely to Iran, and also to Iran’s allies in Iraq. … [Washington] is getting ready to carry out more arrests and pursuits of Iranian agents in Iraq [adding that] this is not something that will end in a month or two months, but will be long enough to make all the parties understand that the US is serious about this fight.

In its lead-in to this story, the Al-Hayat reporter refers to “present advisers and and former officials” who said the recent Iran-weapons show was “in the context of an implied warning” to Iran

[And] they expect that more escalating measures will follow, in the form of arrests and the pursuit of arms networks, or the targeting of leaders of militias allied with Iran. A high American official stressed that Washington already has a lot of other evidence, which will be disclosed at the appropriate time. [The official said this is all part of] “a complete file that includes clear proof of the negative role of Iran in Iraq”.

And the official repeated that information will be disclosed at appropriate times (suggesting a preoccupation with the PR aspects of this).

Interestingly, the Al-Hayat reporter adds:

Washington is bearing down on the preparation of evidence, but it is taking all the time needed to coordinate between the different agencies in the Pentagon and the CIA, so as to avoid the intelligence lapses that preceded the war. Media reports talk about hesitations and divisions within the administration, specifically between the White House and the CIA on the subject of the recent [Iran weapons show]. The Agency opposed it, and finally there was agreement to go ahead on condition that the identity of the officials not be disclosed.

Getting back to Donnelly, the reporter says he emphasized that the pursuit of Iran-connections is going to stay within Iraq, adding the US isn’t about to attack Iran. But the reporter adds: Wayne White of the Middle East Institute and a former US intelligence official, said such operations are going to be necessarily focused on border areas, because the Iranians prefer to minimize their actual presence inside Iraq, and that explains, White said, the relative infrequency of searches relating to this inside Iraq. White’s other point was that the US has to take a targeted, arrest-related approach to this, because the troop level, even after the additional 20,000, isn’t enough to confront the militias head-on.

It would appear from the above comments that what you could call the “Iran-connections operation” is distinct from the “Baghdad-security operation”, and that is exactly what senior cleric and SCIRI politician Jalaladdin al-Saghir said after his mosque-office in Baghdad was raided by US forces yesterday. Saghir told the Al-Hayat reporter:

The forces that raided the mosque yesterday were from US intelligence, and they were looking for personal correspondence…This wasn’t part of the [Baghdad] security plan, and they weren’t looking for weapons. Rather it was part of the hidden agenda [literally, the implicitly-directed agenda] relating to Tehran”.

The bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra is the cornerstone of Bush’s psychological operations (psy-ops) in Iraq. That’s why it is critical to have an independent investigation and discover who is really responsible. The bombing has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event which has deflected responsibility for the 650,000 Iraqi casualties and more than 3 million refugees. These are the victims of American occupation not civil war.

The bombing was concocted by men who believe that they can control the public through perception management. In practical terms, this means that they create events which can be used to support their far-right doctrine. In this case, the destruction of the mosque has been used to confuse the public about the real origins of the rising sectarian tensions and hostilities. The fighting between Sunni and Shiite is the predictable upshot of random bombings and violence which bears the signature of covert operations carried out by intelligence organizations. Most of the pandemonium in Iraq is the result of counterinsurgency operations (black-ops) on a massive scale not civil war.

The Pentagon’s bold new approach to psychological operations (psy-ops) appears to have derived from the theories of former State Dept official, Philip Zelikow (who also served on the 9-11 Commission). Zelikow is an expert on “the creation and maintenance of ‘public myths’ or ‘public presumptions’. His theory analyzes how consciousness is shaped by “searing events” which take on “transcendent importance” and, therefore, move the public in the direction chosen by the policymakers.

“In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he (Zelikow) co-authored an article called ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’ in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade center had succeeded ‘the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. ‘It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet bomb test in 1949. The US might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or US counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.”

Zelikow’s article presumes that if one creates their own “searing event” (such as 9-11 or the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque) they can steer the public in whatever direction they choose. His theory depends entirely on a “state-media nexus” which can be depended on to disseminate propaganda uniformly. There is no more reliable propaganda-system in the world today than the western media.

New Clues in the Bombing

New clues have surfaced in the case of the bombing of the Golden Mosque which suggests that the claims of the Bush administration are false. An article by Marc Santora, (“One Year Later, Golden Mosque is still in Ruins”, New York Times) provides eyewitness testimony of what really took place one year ago:

“A caretaker at the shrine described what happened on the day of the attack, insisting on anonymity because he was afraid that talking to an American could get him killed. The general outline of his account was confirmed by American and Iraqi officials. The night before the explosion, he said, just before the 8 p.m. curfew on Feb. 21, 2006, on the Western calendar, men dressed in commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry entered the shrine. The caretaker said he had been beaten, tied up and locked in a room. Throughout the night, he said, he could hear the sound of drilling as the attackers positioned the explosives, apparently in such a way as to inflict maximum damage on the dome”.(NY Times)

Clearly, if the men were men dressed in “commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry”, then the logical place to begin an investigation would be the Interior Ministry. But there’s never been an investigation and the caretaker has never been asked to testify about what he saw on the night of the bombing. However, if he is telling the truth, we cannot exclude the possibility that paramilitary contractors (mercenaries) or special-ops (intelligence) agents working out of the Interior Ministry may have destroyed the mosque to create the appearance of a nascent civil war.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a process of spinning science is preventing a serious discussion about the state of affairs in Iraq.

The government in Iraq claimed last month that since the 2003 invasion between 40,000 and 50,000 violent deaths have occurred. Few have pointed out the absurdity of this statement.

There are three ways we know it is a gross underestimate. First, if it were true, including suicides, South Africa, Colombia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia have experienced higher violent death rates than Iraq over the past four years. If true, many North and South American cities and Sub-Saharan Africa have had a similar murder rate to that claimed in Iraq. For those of us who have been in Iraq, the suggestion that New Orleans is more violent seems simply ridiculous.

Secondly, there have to be at least 120,000 and probably 140,000 deaths per year from natural causes in a country with the population of Iraq. The numerous stories we hear about overflowing morgues, the need for new cemeteries and new body collection brigades are not consistent with a 10 per cent rise in death rate above the baseline.

And finally, there was a study, peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet, Europe’s most prestigious medical journal, which put the death toll at 650,000 as of last July. The study, which I co-authored, was done by the standard cluster approach used by the UN to estimate mortality in dozens of countries each year. While the findings are imprecise, the lower range of possibilities suggested that the Iraq government was at least downplaying the number of dead by a factor of 10.

There are several reasons why the governments involved in this conflict have been able to confuse the issue of Iraqi deaths. Our Lancet report involved sampling and statistical analysis, which is rather dry reading. Media reports always miss most deaths in times of war, so the estimate by the media-based monitoring system, Iraqbodycount.org (IBC) roughly corresponds with the Iraq government’s figures. Repeated evaluations of deaths identified from sources independent of the press and the Ministry of Health show the IBC listing to be less than 10 per cent complete, but because it matches the reports of the governments involved, it is easily referenced.

Several other estimates have placed the death toll far higher than the Iraqi government estimates, but those have received less press attention. When in 2005, a UN survey reported that 90 per cent of violent attacks in Scotland were not recorded by the police, no one, not even the police, disputed this finding. Representative surveys are the next best thing to a census for counting deaths, and nowhere but Iraq have partial tallies from morgues and hospitals been given such credence when representative survey results are available.

Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, calls her latest paper “pretty dry.” That hasn’t prevented it from riling high-ranking Pentagon officials — who called her and her dean to complain about her work. When they questioned her sources of material, they ran into a bit of a problem: She did most of her research with data on federal Web sites. So what did the Pentagon do? It changed the Web sites, and now continues to trash her research.

Bilmes has become a leading expert on economic questions related to the war in Iraq, and her experience the last few weeks demonstrates how social scientists can end up in the line of political fire when their findings — however dry — offend government officials.

The story begins with a paper Bilmes wrote last year with Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate in economics. In their study, they found that the Bush administration has seriously underestimated the economic costs of the war in Iraq. After the study was publicized, Bilmes was approached by some experts on veterans’ benefits who said that one cost of the war hadn’t received enough attention in their work (or from the government): the costs of caring for veterans injured in the conflict.

And that’s the question that led Bilmes to prepare a 21-page study that she presented this month in Chicago at the Allied Social Sciences Association meeting. The presentation of “Soldiers Returning From Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-Term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits” went off without controversy and might have escaped Pentagon notice. But Bilmes also published an op-ed version of her findings in the Los Angeles Times. The Pentagon did notice that piece.

The central argument of the new Bilmes paper is that so many soldiers are being injured that the costs of caring for them over their lifetimes is likely to be $350 billion, or up to twice that, depending on how long the war lasts. The high cost is the result of huge advances in military medicine that have greatly reduced the chances that a soldier injured in Iraq will die. As a result, the ratio of injuries to deaths — 16:1 by her estimate — is higher than in any other war in U.S. history. (By comparison, in Vietnam the ratio was 2.8:1 and in World War II the ratio was 1.6:1.)

Bilmes uses a series of calculations based on the types of care those injured will require over their lifetimes to offer various scenarios for the costs of the care, and she also argues that the current veterans’ health-care system is not ready for the influx of injured or the associated costs. She offers suggestions for streamlining the process of getting injured veterans the benefits they have earned. And while both her studies and the op-ed are critical of the Bush administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the veterans’ health needs, the tone is academic, not polemic.

What set off the Pentagon was Bilmes’ estimate for the current number of injured of 50,500. William Winkenwender Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, called the Los Angeles Times, Bilmes, and David T. Ellwood — dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government — to complain that the real figure is less than half that — just over 22,000. When Bilmes was asked where she got her data, she pointed out that it came from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which in turn gets its data from the Pentagon.

The Pentagon investigated further and found that the VA “misunderstood” the Pentagon’s reports, according to Cynthia Smith, a Department of Defense spokeswoman. She acknowledged that the VA had been using numbers consistent with what Bilmes reported, but said that once the Pentagon explained “the error,” the Veterans Affairs department changed its Web site so its injury numbers are consistent with those of the Pentagon.

Why the misunderstanding and the “error”? The original figures from Veterans Affairs were for “non-mortal” injuries. But that doesn’t include only those who are shot at in combat. That includes people who get sick, people who are in accidents and so forth — a group of people that is as large as those injured in combat. The Pentagon doesn’t want those people counted.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Pre-war plans for the US invasion of Iraq assumed that only 5,000 US troops would be left in the country by the end of 2006, disclosed military briefing slides disclosed show.

Prepared by the US Central Command in August 2002, the briefing slides set forth a series of other assumptions about post invasion Iraq that also turned out to be wildly off the mark.

Planners believed a credible provisional government would be in place by “D-Day;” that a co-opted Iraqi army would not fight and that the US invasion force would number 383,000 troops.

A slide titled “Phase IV – Notional Ground Force Composition” showed US force levels declining steadily from 270,000 to just 5,000 within 45 months of the invasion phase, as Iraq proceeded from “stabilization” to “recovery” to “transition.”

WASHINGTON – The U.S. government is at risk of squandering significantly more money in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has already wasted or otherwise overcharged taxpayers billions of dollars, federal investigators said Thursday.

The three top auditors overseeing contract work in Iraq told a House committee of $10 billion in spending that was wasteful or poorly tracked. They pointed to numerous instances in which Defense and State department officials condoned or otherwise allowed poor accounting, repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for work shoddily or never done by U.S. contractors.

That problem could worsen, the Government Accountability Office said, given limited improvement so far by the Department of Defense even as the Bush administration prepares to boost the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Given “the need for continued support for deployed forces, it is essential for DOD to address these shortcomings if the department is to increase its return on its investment in Iraq,” said David M. Walker, comptroller general of the GAO, Congress’ auditing arm, in prepared testimony.

The auditors’ joint appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee comes as Congress is preparing for a showdown with
President Bush next month over his budget request of nearly $100 billion to pay for more U.S. troops in Iraq.

Also testifying Thursday were Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William Reed, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

According to their testimony, the investigators:

_Found overpricing and waste in Iraq contracts amounting to $4.9 billion since the Defense Contract Audit Agency began its work in 2003, although some of that money has since been recovered. Another $5.1 billion in expenses were charged without proper documentation.

_Urged the Pentagon to reconsider its growing reliance on outside contractors to run the nation’s wars and reconstruction efforts. Layers of subcontractors, poor documentation and lack of strong contract management are rampant and promote waste even after the GAO first warned of problems 15 years ago.