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TechnoratiUS War Contracts Top $25 Billion: Study
US contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan more than doubled from 2004 to 2006 to over 25 billion dollars but government oversight of the firms involved has slackened, a watchdog group said Monday.
"While the billions of dollars involved and the complexity of these war-related contracts has only grown, the lack of oversight has been staggering," said Bill Buzenberg, head of the Center for Public Integrity.
The study by the independent center said government outsourcing for the two war theaters was marred by issues such as a lack of competitive bidding, missing contracts and unidentified companies.
The construction and services company KBR, formally known as Kellogg, Brown and Root and a subsidiary of oil-services giant Halliburton until April, topped the list with more than 16 billion dollars in US contracts from 2004 to 2006.
Halliburton was led from 1995 to 2000 by Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the most hawkish voices in the administration of President George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
DynCorp International, a provider of private security services to State Department personnel, was a distant second with 1.8 billion dollars in contracts.
Washington Group International, a rival to KBR in building and engineering, was third with just over one billion dollars.
Blackwater, whose security guards were accused of opening fire indiscriminately on Iraqi civilians in a deadly September incident in Baghdad, ranked 12th with 485 million dollars in contracts.
Just ahead of Blackwater was First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, which has been accused of holding foreign laborers against their will to help build the new US embassy in Baghdad. The firm denies the charge.
Topping KBR's haul, 20.4 billion dollars was awarded for services from "unidentified foreign entities" not identified in US government contracts.
The Center for Public Integrity, which says it is a non-partisan group that investigates major public issues, said it was seeking more information on those contracts through the Freedom of Information Act.
The group said that 31 of the contractors on the top 100 list were foreign, including 12 from Turkey.
Overall, US government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown from 11 billion dollars in 2004 to almost 17 billion in 2005 and more than 25 billion last year, the study said.
The center quoted US Comptroller General David Walker as saying, in an interview for the study, that there were particular problems with lack of oversight for military contracting.
"We have identified about 15 systemic, longstanding acquisition and contracting problems that exist within the Defense Department -- which is the single biggest contractor within the US government -- that we are still not making enough progress on," he said.
One official inquiry by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that the State Department was unable to say what it was receiving for much of the money given to DynCorp.
© 2007 Agence France Presse
16 Comments so far
Show AllThis goes to re-inforce the view over 'the pond' here in the Uk that we should pull up the drawbridge and forget about the 'special relationship' that is supposed to exist between us and the USA.
Any government that can approve the total waste of 25 BILLION dollars, yet let people died of poverty at home, has no right to be in office.
All the time the electorate votes for these assholes they should remember that they are responsible for what is happening, nobody else.
God bless America, bcause you certainly need His help!
25 billion for "war contracts" and they tell us SSI is in trouble?!
What a criminal sham!
You have to say that these contracts do exactly what they were designed to do, just not what they were advertised to do. Kind of a summary for corporate america.
Conservatism in action, how impressive!! It is also nice to see the compassion our government has for the big contractors that are tight with Bush and Cheny. They have proved one thing, government is the problem,just like Ronnie Reagan said , and he must be so proud of them as he looks down at their wonderful acccomplishments. New deal and fair deal, gone forever!!
This story of $25 billion USA dollars being spent on civilian contractors in Iraq really makes me furious. And the fact that there is very little oversight just makes matters worse. What is he mater with those folks in Washington who are supposed to be looking
our for us? They very well may be a HUGE part of the problem. Lets get out senators and congressmen to answer to us regarding this terrible issue. NOW
Anne Nicolas Kirby
And yet, we can't find 35 million for kids health?
Reading this, hearing that the Army had dunned an injured GI for $3,000 of the $10,000 signing bonus he received since being wounded in Iraq he couldn't fulfill the final 3 months of his contract, learning more and more of the criminal workings of our government, it occurred to me that if I were younger and able, I'd probably look around for another country into which I would settle. As it is I grieve for the country I thought we had.
"missing contracts and unidentified companies"
You don't spose the Bush/Cheney(Rumsfeld) Crime Family has any info on this...do ya?
when I was a kid and we used to play board games....when it got this bad or usually before now....one or more of us would get upset and turn over the board, them we'd either start another game or quit playing for awhile
sometimes with this much cheating, players wouldn't be able to play
isn't it funny as kids we had more sense than to put up with this
then too, there were rules to the games....didn't there used to be a US Constitution which was supposed to be the rules to this game?
as I got older there was a movie staring George C. Scott as General George S. Patton in which in
one of his speech's said something about "What did you do in the war Daddy?" And George said, you didn't want your answer to be, 'Well I shovelled shit in Louisianna' or something along those lines
Well what are we doing now folks???
IMPEACH AND PROSECUTE NOW ACCORDING TO THE US CONSTITUTION
or Awaken to find the board turned over and you're knee deep in Louisianna
An excellent resource for this type of info is Naomi Klein's powerful and current book, "The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". The ongoing privatization of the military and the federal government, in general, is turning the executive branch into a hollow shell. The statistics and trends she cites prove the "fascist shift" described in "The End of America, A Letter to a Young Patriot", by Naomi Wolf. In a sense, we have on our hands a "rolling coup".
An excellent resource for this type of info is Naomi Klein's powerful and current book, "The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". The ongoing privatization of the military and the federal government, in general, is turning the executive branch into a hollow shell. The statistics and trends she cites prove the "fascist shift" described in "The End of America, A Letter to a Young Patriot", by Naomi Wolf. In a sense, we have on our hands a "rolling coup".
So much for welfare reform.
Money for jam and they don't even have to complete any project, just run up cost over runs for work of a sub standard nature, then get more to fix the problems they built in with the shoddy work,Iraq and Afghanistan, worse off now that they have been liberated and brought democracy,all this liberation is great for business and profit
Right out of Hitler's playbook.
Any illusion left that the U.S. is a democracy?
THE DUNCAN HUNTER WELFARE WARRIOR PROGRAM
Duncan Hunter has cited the 1940 peak ONE-PER-HOUR production rate for B-24 Liberator Bombers from the Willow Run plant as an example of what "we" can do to face a "common" enemy.
As a sock puppet for the military-industrial complex, Hunter has lost all sight of anything economic. If anything remotely near the productivity of the Willow Run plant was applied to Hunter's CURRENT POLITICAL sponsors, it would easily reveal a 90% waste rate at the first prick of the auditor's pin.
How much more UNPATRIOTIC could one be than Duncan Hunter, exploiting a massive spending machine of waste and fraud on the backs of citizens and soldiers.
Were the current military machine anywhere near the productive efficiency of the Willow Run plant, the Duncan Hunters of the world along with his pals would be the first ones culled out and tossed onto the trash heap of scabs and parasites pulling down the "good war" effort.