If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Bush administration and Iraq, it’s don’t mess with Dick Cheney’s corporate buddies at Halliburton and KBR. If you do, you end up like this poor man, a former Army contract official who had the temerity to question $1 billion dollars worth of questionable charges by KBR back in 2004. What happened to him is an object lesson in the way our government and the war on terror has been run solely for the benefit of Cheney’s cronies (from the NY Times):
The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.
The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.
Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.
Not a surprise, I know, but has any sitting Vice president, who retained a financial interest in the companies he formerly controlled as CEO, ever had such a corrupting influence over how government contracts were awarded and managed for the benefit of his friends? Has war profiteering ever been taken to this level in the history of the United States? Have we ever wasted more public monies for shoddy services and paid fraudulent and/or questionable charges to companies who received special treatment and protection for their racketeering from the highest and most powerful elected officials in our government? And has any presidential administration in history ever done more to cover up the corruption and outright theft of public funds which, by its own actions it not only countenanced, but actively promoted?
Well, I think you know the answer to those questions as well as I do. One priority of the next administration has to be investigations into the fraud and abuse which occurred during the Bush years, along with criminal and civil prosecutions to punish the guilty and recover the monies that have been stolen from the public treasury. Why don’t we ask the Presidential candidates what they plan to do about this. I think I already know what John McCain will say. Hopefully, Obama will have a different agenda in mind when it comes to undoing the wrongs that the crooks in the Bush administration have so willingly and brazenly perpetrated.
