The Military Industrial Complex Free Shit Army continues to do their part in the ultimate destruction of our country. Remember the bridges to nowhere we built in America? The Pentagon builds international airports to nowhere in Iraq with your money. Not only did your military and State Dept waste $51 billion in the failed hell hole state of Iraq, but they don’t even know what they wasted it on. Then your government spent $200 million trying to figure out what they wasted the money on, but were unable to figure it out because there weren’t enough auditors. Clusterfuck is too kind of a word for the Iraq adventure. It will be the gift that keeps giving for decades. Thank you George “Mission Accomplished” Bush. Have you found those WMD yet?
And now your healthcare is going to be under the complete control of these government numbskulls. What could possibly go wrong?
Final US audit of reconstruction effort in Iraq says billions of dollars likely wasted
By Associated Press, Published: July 13
WASHINGTON — After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can’t say how much.
In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put “billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation” in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.
“The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known,” the report said.
The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company’s billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.
With dry understatement, the inspector general said that while he couldn’t pinpoint the amount wasted, it “could be substantial.”
Asked why the exact amount squandered can never be determined, the inspector general’s office referred The Associated Press to a report it did in February 2009 titled “Hard Lessons,” in which it said the auditors — much like the reconstruction managers themselves — faced personnel shortages and other hazards.
“Given the vicissitudes of the reconstruction effort — which was dogged from the start by persistent violence, shifting goals, constantly changing contracting practices and undermined by a lack of unity of effort — a complete accounting of all reconstruction expenditures is impossible to achieve,” the report concluded.
In that same report, the inspector general, Stuart Bowen, recalled what then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked when they met shortly after Bowen started in January 2004: “Why did you take this job? It’s an impossible task.”
By law, Bowen’s office reports to both the secretary of defense and the secretary of state. It goes out of business in 2013.
Bowen’s office has spent more than $200 million tracking the reconstruction funds, and in addition to producing numerous reports, his office has investigated criminal fraud that has resulted in 87 indictments, 71 convictions and $176 million in fines and other penalties. These include civilians and military members accused of kickbacks, bribery, bid-rigging, fraud, embezzlement and outright theft of government property and funds.
Much, however, apparently got overlooked. Example: A $35 million Pentagon project was started in December 2006 to establish the Baghdad airport as an international economic gateway, and the inspector general found that by the end of 2010 about half the money was “at risk of being wasted” unless someone else completed the work.
Of the $51 billion that Congress approved for Iraq reconstruction, about $20 billion was for rebuilding Iraqi security forces and about $20 billion was for rebuilding the country’s basic infrastructure. The programs were run mainly by the Defense Department, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A key weakness found by Bowen’s inspectors was inadequate reviewing of contractors’ invoices.
In some cases invoices were checked months after they had been paid because there were too few government contracting officers. Bowen found a case in which the State Department had only one contracting officer in Iraq to validate more than $2.5 billion in spending on a DynCorp contract for Iraqi police training.
“As a result, invoices were not properly reviewed, and the $2.5 billion in U.S. funds were vulnerable to fraud and waste,” the report said. “We found this lack of control to be especially disturbing since earlier reviews of the DynCorp contract had found similar weaknesses.”
In that case, the State Department eventually reconciled all of the old invoices and as of July 2009 had recovered more than $60 million.
The report touched on a problem that cropped up in virtually every major aspect of the U.S. war effort in Iraq, namely, the consequences of fighting an insurgency that proved more resilient than the Pentagon had foreseen. That not only made reconstruction more difficult, dangerous and costly, but also left the U.S. military unprepared for the grind of multiple troop deployments, the tactics of an adaptable insurgency and the complexity of battlefield wounds. It also left the U.S. government short of the expertise it needed to monitor contractors.
TeresaE says:
If they’re telling us they spent $51 billion, we probably wasted twice that.
When you are awash in OPM, and there are no checks and balances, or ROI studies, you spend OPM like a drunken sailor. Human nature.
Looking around at the REAL economic activity in this country, I believe you can trace most of it back to Washington. Which means that they HAVE to be spending trillions more than reported.
So I call bullshit on what they claim “may” be wasted. I bet it is so much worse in reality.
Someday, when the world is stuffed so full of useless American fiat that it cannot take another drop of it, we are going to be in a world of hurt.
With leaders like those represented in this story in charge, I’m doubting that there is going to be a pill, or app, to ease our pain.
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14th July 2012 at 10:49 am
Muck About says:
Ah… Nothing to see here, folks. Move along to the next shearing booth please.. Stay in single file as that makes it easier to separate you from your money. Move along, please..
MA
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14th July 2012 at 10:56 am
AWD says:
The United States of Halliburton
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14th July 2012 at 11:15 am
AWD says:
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14th July 2012 at 11:18 am
Anonymous says:
What do you expect with these three corporate controlled stooges leading the clown car parade?
A nation of 310 millions and this is the best we’ve got?
God help US.
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14th July 2012 at 11:32 am
Buckhed says:
As I’ve said on here many times when commenting on the Military/Industrial Mega Complex…Smedley Butler said it best…”War Is A Racket “
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14th July 2012 at 11:47 am
Burning says:
” . . .healthcare is going to be under the complete control of these government numbskulls . . .”
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that healthcare is going to be under the complete control of Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance, as that power has been ceded to them by the diktat of these government numbskulls?
Anonymous has it right: “Corporate controlled stooges” are facilitating the looting by Halliburton & their cohorts. The fact that it’s “OPM” as TeresaE describes it, is not the ultimate reason for the waste. It is the rapacious determination of the military-industrial crowd to expropriate money from the Treasury whatever its source, whether taxed from US citizenry, borrowed from China or stolen from brown foreigners unlucky enough to have their sand sitting on top of “our” oil.
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14th July 2012 at 12:38 pm
Ron says:
All the wars are a racket,do you really feel threatened by Iran or Iraq or Afganistan?Its all a big money making scam. How about the military bases we build and support all over the planet?
Oh and those tricky germans and japanese,glad were still there to keep them in check.
We have conventional bombs that can be delivered by one plane that can level citys.
Submarines that have enough firepower to destroy the planet.And aircraft carriers battle groups that by themselves could take on most countrys.
I was in the military and learned much about government waste.Makes me sick.Both Romney and Obama are nuts,or bought and paid for by the people that make money from war and the military.
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14th July 2012 at 12:38 pm
SSS says:
$51 billion would have built 5 or 6 nuclear power plants, but with “proper government supervision,” that would have dropped to a dozen squirrels running in cages.
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14th July 2012 at 1:32 pm
Administrator says:
$51 billion would have been the cost overruns on one nuclear power plant attempted by these mega-utility companies run by morons.
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14th July 2012 at 1:34 pm
SSS says:
“$51 billion would have been the cost overruns on one nuclear power plant attempted by these mega-utility companies run by morons.”
—-Admin
Ha, ha. Admit it. You came flying out of that fracas with your hat on backwards.
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14th July 2012 at 1:44 pm
Administrator says:
Keep counting on those dividends. They’re safe.
BWAAAHHHAAAAA
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14th July 2012 at 1:48 pm
KaD says:
And yet things that need to be fixed here don’t get done; like this: Leaked Docs Reveal ‘Off the Charts’ Damage at US Nuke Plant
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/07/13-0
Edison and the NRC have admitted that the problems with San Onofre’s steam tubes are an anomaly, but they haven’t been forthcoming about just how historically off-the-charts the damage is in comparison to the rest of the nuclear industry,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds and co-author of the report.
“This reveals a far greater problem than has been previously disclosed, and raises serious questions about whether it is safe to restart either unit,” said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear expert at UC-Santa Cruz, to Agence France-Presse.
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14th July 2012 at 10:56 am
SSS says:
KaD
Nice try. You cite Arnie Gundersen, who runs a so-called nonprofit organization called Fairewinds Associates which seeks to “educate the public on the nuclear industry.” Bullshit. Gundersen is actually a front man for extremist anti-nuclear environmental groups, who pay him well to run around the country and provide expert testimony on the evils of nuclear power. What groups you ask? Try Friends of the Earth, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, and Greenpeace.
Try this, from NEInuclearnotes.blogspot, to counter your post:
“Nuclear consultants Fairewinds Associates and anti-nuclear activists Friends of the Earth are at it again with a new “report” that seeks to create concern, with little to no substance, over steam generator tube leaks at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). The report, “Steam Generator Failures at San Onofre,” claims that without a thorough root cause analysis of why the plant’s recently installed steam generator tubes have become worn, that:
“…radioactive releases might be significantly larger than those that occurred after the January 2012 tube leak. Such an accident would cause implementation of the California emergency evacuation plan and closing of the San Clemente beach and Interstate I-5, potentially for an extended period of time.”
Fairewinds’ opinion misleads the general public to believe that the plant already released a large amount of radiation, which in fact, it has not. In a February 17 press release, Southern California Edison (SCE) clarified:
The radioactivity released to the atmosphere during the steam generator tube leak was barely measurable – 4E-5 millirems or 0.00004 millirems — which is 200 times less than you would receive by having a smoke detector in your home for a year.”
But you know what, KaD, I hope Gundersen and his fellow travelers in Friends of the Earth win and mange to shut the whole fucking San Onofre plant down. Then I hope a sustained, prolonged heat wave smashs into Southern California. Let the rolling brownouts and blackouts begin, and the morgues start filling up with people dying from the heat wave without the power they could have had save for some alarmist shitbags. That’s what I hope.
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14th July 2012 at 3:42 pm