The Rag Blog

A Halliburton subsidiary charged the Iraqi government as much as $25,000 per month for each of as many as 1,800 fuel trucks that were to deliver gasoline to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, but the trucks often spent days or weeks sitting idle on the border, says a report released yesterday by an auditing agency sponsored by the United Nations.

The agency said in a statement that the auditing firm it hired had found that some of the contract costs that had been questioned earlier seemed to be justified. But the agency said the findings raised new questions about hundreds of millions of dollars billed by the company under a $2.4 billion contract that the Army awarded on the eve of the conflict to KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root.

The new audit gives the first detailed picture of how the company incurred many of those costs.

The audit said the Kuwaiti government had set the price of its gasoline at $1.13 a gallon. But with the delivery charges, the effective cost of the gas was calculated to be much higher, about $8 a gallon, according to a participant in a meeting in Paris last week at which the audits were presented to the auditing agency and the Iraqi government.

Questions have been raised about the contract since 2003, when it first became public that the contract had been awarded without competitive bidding.

WASHINGTON — While surging violence grabs headlines, Iraq reconstruction continues to fall far short of U.S. and Iraqi goals, further undermining stability in the nascent democracy.

And in a “shoot the messenger” coup de grâce, the latest casualty in the war may be the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) whose investigations have exposed waste, fraud, and mismanagement of billions of dollars spent by U.S. taxpayers in rebuilding Iraq.

In a stealth blow during a closed-door conference on a major defense bill, the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee inserted a provision to shutdown the Special Inspector General (IG) office led by Stuart Bowen Jr.

Tracking tax payer dollars

Bowen’s office opened in Januar 2004 with the task of tracking the $18 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars initially allocated for Iraqi reconstruction. The Special IG office was supposed to be temporary, but then again so was the war.

The U.S. government’s plan was to execute reconstruction rapidly in Iraq — but many of the efforts have been stymied by the worsening security in the country.

“This was a waste of money because the contractors were ordered to go to Iraq to work, but they weren’t working,” explained Bowen (whose office will disappear in October 2007 unless critics of the termination prevail in having the office continue). Due to the deteriorating security situation, many contractors were forced to remain idle, but taxpayer dollars still had to pay for their food and housing while they waited to begin work in Iraq. “About $62 million was spent on overhead for contractors that only accomplished $26 million in construction work.”

By the end of September 2006, according to the latest SIGIR report, 100 percent of the $18.44 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF) has been “obligated” (or allocated) — and major U.S. spending is rapidly winding down. In three and a half years, over nine Congressional bills, U.S. taxpayers have paid $38.4 billion for Iraq reconstruction.

A bipartisan group led by Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is seeking to keep the Special IG office in business.

“I strongly support the continuation of [Bowen’s] office as long as American tax dollars are being spent on Iraq reconstruction,” said Collins. “I am working with Senators Russ Feingold, John Warner and Joseph Lieberman and will propose legislation to extend the term of the SIGIR past the October 1, 2007, expiration date.”

Money’s worth?

Have American taxpayers gotten their money’s worth? Specific contractor abuses, such as overcharging and shoddy construction, have been well-publicized.

Many press accounts of the latest SIGIR report released Oct. 30 made particular note of the fact that the U.S. government lost track of weapons purchased with reconstruction funds for the Iraqi security forces. “There were a mixture of pistols and assault rifles,” said Bowen. “Primarily, 13,000 of them were semiautomatic nine millimeter pistols.” Where the missing weapons are is unknown.

I’m more than a little worried. This is Bush’s final card. The elections came and went and a group of extremists and thieves were put into power (no, no- I meant in Baghdad, not Washington). The constitution which seems to have drowned in the river of Iraqi blood since its elections has been forgotten. It is only dug up when one of the Puppets wants to break apart the country. Reconstruction is an aspiration from another lifetime: I swear we no longer want buildings and bridges, security and an undivided Iraq are more than enough. Things must be deteriorating beyond imagination if Bush needs to use the ‘Execute the Dictator’ card.

Iraq has not been this bad in decades. The occupation is a failure. The various pro-American, pro-Iranian Iraqi governments are failures. The new Iraqi army is a deadly joke. Is it really time to turn Saddam into a martyr? Things are so bad that even pro-occupation Iraqis are going back on their initial ‘WE LOVE AMERICA’ frenzy.

It’s not about the man – presidents come and go, governments come and go. It’s the frustration of feeling like the whole country and every single Iraqi inside and outside of Iraq is at the mercy of American politics. It is the rage of feeling like a mere chess piece to be moved back and forth at will. It is the aggravation of having a government so blind and uncaring about their peoples needs that they don’t even feel like it’s necessary to go through the motions or put up an act. And it’s the deaths. The thousands of dead and dying, with Bush sitting there smirking and lying about progress and winning in a country where every single Iraqi outside of the Green Zone is losing.

Once again… The timing of all of this is impeccable- two days before congressional elections. And if you don’t see it, then I’m sorry, you’re stupid. Let’s see how many times Bush milks this as a ‘success’ in his coming speeches.

A final note. I just read somewhere that some of the families of dead American soldiers are visiting the Iraqi north to see ‘what their sons and daughters died for’. If that’s the goal of the visit, then, “Ladies and gentlemen- to your right is the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, to your left is the Dawry refinery… Each of you get this, a gift bag containing a 3 by 3 color poster of Al Sayid Muqtada Al Sadr (Long May He Live And Prosper), an Ayatollah Sistani t-shirt and a map of Iran, to scale, redrawn with the Islamic Republic of South Iraq. Also… Hey you! You – the female in the back – is that a lock of hair I see? Cover it up or stay home.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has promised there will not be a change of course in Iraq if the Democrats take back Congress. Potential House leader Nancy Pelosi has assured voters that impeachment is not in the cards for Bush, either. Yet the liberal establishment is beaconing antiwar voters to clamor for the Democratic Party next Tuesday. It seems like 2004 all over again.

I recently disparaged the positions of progressive media critic Jeff Cohen and The Nation magazine for not supporting independent antiwar candidates, and instead calling for more of the same: i.e. voting for the Democrats even though we disagree with them on the war and a host of other issues. If we want to take on Bush, they argue, the Democrats have to take back Congress, and only then can we start to build a genuine progressive movement.

In the meantime, however, the war will rage on and Bush will remain at the helm of Empire with Congress’s blessing. As the Washington Post reported on August 27, of the 46 candidates in tight House races this year, 29 oppose a timetable for troop withdraw. That’s a whopping 63% of Democrats in hotly contested races who have exactly the same position on the war as our liar-in-chief, George W. Bush.

Even so, Howard Dean offers up his own deceptive outlook, “[W]e will put some pressure on him (Bush) to have some benchmarks, some timetables and a real plan other than stay the course.”

UNITED NATIONS (Nov. 7) – Panama won a seat on the U.N. Security Council on the 48th ballot Tuesday after U.S.-backed Guatemala and Venezuela, led by leftist anti-American President Hugo Chavez, dropped out to end a deadlock.

Panama got 164 votes in the 192-member U.N. General Assembly, more than the 120 needed to win a two-year term starting Jan. 1 on the U.N.’s most powerful body. Venezuela got 11 votes, Guatemala 4 votes, and Barbados 1 vote.

RICHMOND, Va. (Nov. 7) – The FBI was investigating complaints about attempts to intimidate voters in the U.S. Senate race between GOP Sen. George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb, the State Board of Elections said Tuesday.

Jean Jensen, secretary of the Board of Elections, said that her office has forwarded reports of several instances of phone calls to voters that apparently were aimed at misleading voters into staying home on Election Day or leading them to the wrong polling place.

Voters in the cities of Covington, Hampton and Colonial Heights and the counties of Accomack, Northampton and Fairfax reported getting deceptive telephone calls in the days before the election informing them that their voting place had changed, when they had not, Jensen said.

In Arlington County, resident Timothy Daly reported getting a phone message Sunday from the “Virginia Elections Commission” telling him that he was registered to vote in New York, and therefore couldn’t vote in Virginia.

“If you do show up, you will be charged criminally,” said the message, the text of which appeared on Daly’s affidavit to the Board of Elections.

Lawrence Peter Baumann, a Northampton County resident, said in his affidavit that he got a call on Friday from a woman claiming to be from the Webb campaign, and he assured her that he planned to vote for Webb.

EACH voter will have a favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006. Forced to pick my own, I’d go for Lynne Cheney’s pre-Halloween slapdown of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. It’s not in every political campaign that you get to watch the wife of the vice president of the United States slug it out about lesbian sex while promoting a children’s book titled “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America.”

The pretext for this improbable dust-up was a last-ditch strategy by the flailing incumbent Republican senator of Virginia, George Allen. Desperate to resuscitate his campaign, Senator Allen attacked his opponent, Jim Webb, for writing sexually explicit passages in his acclaimed novels about the Vietnam War. Mr. Webb fought back by pointing out, among other Republican hypocrisies, Mrs. Cheney’s authorship of an out-of-print 1981 novel, “Sisters,” with steamy sexual interludes suitable for “The L Word.”

When Mr. Blitzer brought up “Sisters” on live television, Mrs. Cheney went ballistic, calling Mr. Webb a liar. The exchange would have been a TiVo keeper had only the CNN anchor called Mrs. Cheney out by reading aloud just one of the many “Sisters” passages floating around the Internet: “The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” But you can’t have everything.

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the “black” sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

Last month’s mass firing of House Appropriations Committee investigators followed years of declining appetite for tough oversight and partisan squabbles that the investigators say often stalled their work.

Several members of the team, some of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified by name, defend their record against committee spokesman John Scofield’s charge that recent work was not good. They suggest instead that majority Republicans had no appetite for oversight of the Bush administration.

The investigators said they identified billions of dollars in potential savings every year, particularly in the Defense budget, and that they heard no complaints until Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., dismissed 60 contractors on Oct. 16.

Joseph Stehr, a retired FBI agent who had been a member of the team off and on since 1985, said he remains stunned by Lewis’ action. “It reeks, it really does,” he said. “It just amazes me that after 60 some years, that just with the swipe of a pencil the thing could all go away.”