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June 27, 2007
Iraq Contracts: Waxman Updates Data on Questionable Deals
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the powerful committee chairman who has had Iraq contract fraud in the crosshairs for years, updates his assessment of government contracting under the Bush Administration. The update reflects what he views as worrisome trends that are just getting worse.
Thoughts from the chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee:
1. Annual federal procurement spending crossed the $400 billion threshold.
2. More than half of this spending -- over $200 billion in new contracts -- was awarded without full and open competition.
3. Total value of wasteful federal contracts now exceeds $1 trillion.
Here's the updated database of federal contracts "exhibiting signs of waste, fraud, and abuse" and here's Waxman's breakdown on questionable Iraq contracts.
By the way, Waxman gave a pretty comprehensive interview with Truthdig a few weeks ago.
Posted by davidphinney at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 25, 2007
Oops: Another KBR Cost Overrun
KBR forgot to keep accurate records of gasoline distribution, quartered employees in living spaces that may be larger than necessary and served meals that appeared to cost $4.5 million more than what was being eaten, according to a new Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction audit. SIGIR selectively distributed the report to favored news outlets on Sunday in anticipation of a Monday release.
The report is all about one KBR task order in the Green Zone, the place where order is supposedly the best -- and one assumes where wartime exigencies are the least.
The Washington Post reveals from a reading:
KBR managed its housing at its Camp Hope inside the Green Zone, resulting in most of its employees living in more spacious quarters than those they support.... Ninety percent of KBR employees were assigned to trailer spaces without roommates, meaning KBR employees appeared to have better housing than Army captains.
The SIGIR report surveys a "small sliver" of KBR's Green Zone business -- a task order for supplying gasoline, food services, and housing and various morale and recreation services.
KBR failed to use an internal meter in gas pumps that tracks how much fuel is used, according to the report.
When auditors looked at the database in September 2006, it showed that 12,622 liters had been issued for December 2006 -- "a future date and an obvious impossibility," the audit said.
Here's The Washington Post's curtain raiser to the report: Audit of KBR Iraq Contract Faults Records For Fuel, Food.
Posted by davidphinney at 01:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Private Security Companies in the News Media
Researchers with the Project for Excellence in Journalism tackle news coverage over the past four years of private security companies and they suggests that it is very much on the slim side:
Coverage of events inside Iraq, which includes the actions of U.S. troops there, was the third=biggest news story in the American media for the first quarter of 2007, according to PEJ research.... But those numbers do not include some 30,000 employees of U.S. and European-based Private Security Companies (PSCs), who work in some of Iraq's most dangerous areas.
Unanswered Questions: Using the number of 30,000 armed contractors, the study claims that 20 percent of the foreign troops in the Iraq are private employees.
$Money$: This is one of the vexing issues. How much money is being spent on PSCs? "Financing can be difficult to track. Some PSC personnel are paid directly by the U.S. government, while others work as sub-contractors or sub-sub-contractors for other companies doing business in Iraq."
Who's in Charge?: " While PSCs work alongside the U.S. military in Iraq, ultimately they serve at the discretion of the groups that hire them. Those employers may be the government, but they could also be some third party."
How Much Media Coverage?: "Private Security Companies are a relatively unknown commodity in the mainstream media’s Iraq reportage."
All the empirical data on media outlet coverage and accompanying narrative can be found at Private Security Companies in Iraq: A PEJ Study
The study forgot to throw these into the mix: Scandals Confront Military Security Industry and Tension and Confusion Grow Amid the "Fog of War"
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June 17, 2007
The New Web Site
Check out my new ROUGH CUT..... It's under construction and a work in progress.... Roughly speaking.
Posted by davidphinney at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Contractors Battle for Insurance Coverage
The news media increasingly recognize the hidden cost of war and the injured contractor's fight for insurance coverage continues rising in recognition.
Contractor Samuel Walker just may becoming the poster child/guy for telling the story:
When Walker got back to the U.S., he brought some of the battlefield home with him. He heard phantom screams in broad daylight, smelled gunpowder that wasn't there. A loud noise would send him into a defensive crouch. He'd been eating French fries in the mess hall at the time of the blast, and the sight of a McDonald's restaurant now brought back violent memories.... Walker said that he understood that working in Iraq could be risky, but that he never expected his toughest battles to take place after he returned home.... Insurance company officials "were fighting because they didn't want to pay," said Walker, 46, a Georgia resident. "Whatever they could do to keep it going as long as possible, they did. They were hoping that I would give up and let it go."
Read about Samuel Walker's story and others on page one ofThe Los Angeles Times 'War, Red Tape Haunt Civilian Workers.'
A Times investigation of a taxpayer-financed insurance system, based on reviews of scores of cases, has found a pattern of repeatedly blocked claims for treatment of psychological injuries sustained by civilian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Walker also has been featured by Dan Rather Reports.
I wrote about Walker and the overall insurance several years ago in 'Adding Insult to Injury.' It was the kind of story at the time where, at the time, liberals received it as stupid pandering to greedy contractors and conservatives called it anti-American. I just found it compelling as an unplanned consequence of privatized war. Contractors may just be the latest chapter in America's sometimes short attention span for those who fought in a controversial war. Remember all the homeless Vietnam vets?
The LA Times Notes:
Steven Birnbaum, a San Rafael lawyer who specializes in Defense Base Act cases, believes many psychological problems go unreported. Unlike the Department of Defense, which keeps track of post-traumatic stress in soldiers, no government agency monitors the mental health of contractors."Contractors have no support. They don't have the VA [Veterans Affairs]. They don't have the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans," Birnbaum said.
"We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We're at the beginning of a deluge," he said.
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June 02, 2007
Contractors Overlooked
They are part of our war: So notes Rosa Brooks, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
" In Iraq, civilian contractors form a vast parallel army. In the Persian Gulf War, fewer than 10,000 civilian contractors accompanied more than 500,000 military personnel. In Iraq today, an estimated 126,000 Defense Department civilian contractors support 145,000 troops. Thousands more civilians work under contract to other U.S. government agencies."
....When civilian contractors die in Iraq, most of us don’t waste many tears. These are guys who went to Iraq out of sheer greed, lured by salaries far higher than those received by military personnel, right? If they get themselves killed, who cares?But we should all care. Not because it’s our patriotic duty to support the lucrative corporate empires that employ the thousands of civilian contractors in Iraq, but because most of the men and women employed by these corporate giants are in Iraq at our government’s behest.
Posted by davidphinney at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack