dana west
Registered on
Sep-16-2002
More User Info
|
Message #114371 posted by dana west (Info) May 05, 2008 03:54:42 ET
Contractors Gone Wild
by Bruce Falconer
5/3/2008
Allegations of widespread mismanagement and corruption among private
contractors in Iraq are nothing new; if anything, tales of cron yism,
over-billing, and embezzlement have become so frequent that our national
tolerance for them seems only to have increased as the Iraq War has drawn
on. Even so, the testimony earlier this week of three whistleblowers before
the Senate's Democr atic Policy Committee (DPC) stands out for the sheer
outrageousness of their accusations-namely that U.S. private contractors
looted Iraqi palaces and ministries, stole military equipment, fenced
supplies destined for U.S. troops, and even operate d a prostitution ring
that may have contributed to the death of fellow contractor. Yet despite its
focus on such salacious matters as sex and corruption, the session earned
little media attention.
The first to testify was Frank Cassaday, a former KBR employee who worked as
an ice plant operator in Fallujah in 2004 and 2005. "Ice was a very
valuable commodity in Iraq that was regularly stolen and bartered for other
goods," he told the committee. He recalled how a convoy of U.S. Marines,
in preparation for an operation that would take them outside the wire for
several days, requested 28 bags of ice to keep their food fresh in the
desert heat. They received only three."The ice foreman was cheating the
troops out of ice at the same time that he was trading the ice for DVDs,
CDs, food, and other items at the Iraqi shops across the street," Cassaday
said. "This foreman would change the ice tally sheets at the distribution
area I worked in to make it seem as though we had handed out more ice to the
Marines than we actually did."
Cassaday said he later observed his colleagues returning to KBR’s camp
with equipment they had stolen from the U.S. military, including
refrigerators, artille ry round detonators, two rocket launchers, and about
800 rounds of small arms ammunition. After he informed the KBR camp manager
of the thefts, Marines searched the camp with dogs to recover the stolen
property. For his trouble, Cassaday said, KBR sec urity officers jailed him
in his tent for two days. He then spent another four days in "protective
custody" before being transferred, against his will, to work in a laundry.
The practice of stealing equipment and supplies destined for the U.S.
m ilitary was so pervasive that KBR employees invented a slang term to
describe it: "drug deals." But thefts were not limited to military
supplies, said Linda Warren, another former KBR employee who testified at
the hearing. Upon her arrival in Baghd ad in 2004, she was shocked by the
number of contractors involved in criminal activity. "KBR employees who
were contracted to perform construction duties inside palaces and municipal
buildings were looting," she said. "Not only were they looting, but t hey
had a system in place to get contraband out of the country so it could be
sold on eBay. They stole artwork, rugs, crystal, and even melted down gold
to make spurs for cowboy boots." Like Cassaday, when she complained to her
superiors about the thef ts, she was punished. She said her vehicle was taken
away, her movements were closely monitored, and her access to phones and the
Internet were cut off. Eventually, she was transferred out of Baghdad.
Perhaps more shocking than any of this was the acc usation from Barry Halley,
a former project manager for Worldwide Network Services, a Washington,
D.C.-based firm that was working on subcontract for DynCorp. According to
Halley, his site manager in Iraq, who he said was employed by a "major
defense contractor," moonlighted as the leader of a prostitution ring
serving American contractors in Iraq that indirectly caused the death of a
colleague. "A co-worker unrelated to the ring was killed when he was
traveling in an unsecure car and shot performing a high-risk mission," he
told the committee. "I believe that my co-worker could have survived if he
had been riding in an armored car. At the time, the armored car that he
would otherwise have been riding in was being used by a manager to transport
prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad." The prostitution ring was shut down
when the company's home office learned of it, but, Halley said, the
manager who controlled it retained his job, moving on to work another
contract in Haiti.
A theme running through all three witnesses' testimony, aside from the
pervasiveness of corruption among private contractors in Iraq, was that
blowing the whistle on abuses rarely did any good. As is often the case with
whistl eblowers, speaking out was a shortcut to getting fired or demoted.
"There's a no-talk, no-speak policy in effect in Iraq about what goes
on," Halley said.
According to Cassaday, although contractors for KBR are trained to report
irregularities, the practice is generally frowned on by managers in the
field. "In Houston at the training camp that I was at for two weeks before
we went over to Iraq, they told us that, "Our door is always open. If you
have a problem, just come on in," he said. "But what they don't
tell you is there's a back door to that office. If you come in and you
complain about something, you're going to be going out that back door.
You're going to either be transferred someplace you don't want to be, or
you're going to be fired."
Arriving nearly two weeks after the military awarded a 10-year logistical
contract worth up to $150 billion to DynCorp, KBR, and a third firm, the DPC
hearing was the thirteenth in a series designed to look into contractor
fraud and abuse in the reconstruction of Iraq. Although, as a partisan
committee, it has no powers to pass legislation, DPC members do refer
allegations to the Department of Justice and the Pentagon's Inspector
General for further investigation, says Barry Piatt, the DPC's
communications director. Committee chairman Senator Byron Dorgan of North
Dakota has been advocating for the creation of a permanent, bipartisan
Wartime Contracting Commission to loo k into the types of accusations raised
this week, but so far, says Piatt, Senate Republicans have blocked the
measure. Until he is able to obtain the necessary 60 votes, Dorgan will
continue to negotiate with the opposition in hopes of peeling away enough
support to establish the commission. In the meantime, "the hearings that
need to be done will be done," says Piatt. "The Republicans won't be able
to block that, and by continuing to do them, [Senator Dorgan] is showing the
work that a committee like that would do."
"t
|
