The Rip Off in Iraq
The Rip-off in Iraq: You Will Not Believe How Low the War Profiteers
Have Gone
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on August 30, 2007, Printed on August 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60950/
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get
away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger
extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest
O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in
Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air
Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible
for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual
budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years,
becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends
you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the
summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for
Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on
Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've
been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in
Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace,
garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end
neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks
moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On
October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living
that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a
contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design
and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to
house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72
million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one
of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically
useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and
ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar
plumbing in the upper floors.
You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college
in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of
one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of
diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write,
adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently
stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance
dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt."
The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown
splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the
House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them,
your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a
former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of
contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-
minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned
gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an
irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen
how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all
it would be" is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of
a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money
and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your
company's compensation. Touchy subject -- you've got a "cost-
plus" contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of
three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend,
the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But
before this milk-faced congressman can even think about
suggesting that you give these millions back, you've got to cut him
off. "So you won't voluntarily look at this," Van Hollen is mumbling,
"and say, given what has happened in this project … "
"No, sir, I will not," you snap.
"… 'We will return the profits.' …"
"No, sir, I will not," you repeat.
Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home,
take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the
little woman… . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your
president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485
million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of
Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now
assessed at $929,974, and you're sure as hell not giving it back to
anyone.
"Yeah, I don't know what I expected him to say," Van Hollen says
now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the
money back. "It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the
taxpayer, for everything."
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget,
and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient.
George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an
experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully
privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between
essential government services and for-profit enterprises have
been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where
wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear,
where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at
slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in
KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no
matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies
and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that
this is the way someone up there would like things run all over --
not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for
Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to
deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush
administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted
capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the
customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by
the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This
is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-
people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and
laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both
ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military
adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so
that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle
Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on
foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it
lasted. Since time immemorial, the distribution of government
largesse had followed a staid, paper-laden procedure in which the
federal government would post the details of a contract in
periodicals like Commerce Business Daily or, more recently, on the
FedBizOpps Web site. Competitive bids were solicited and
contracts were awarded in accordance with the labyrinthine print of
the U.S. Code, a straightforward system that worked well enough
before the Bush years that, as one lawyer puts it, you could "count
the number of cases of criminal fraud on the fingers of one hand."
There were exceptions to the rule, of course -- emergencies that
required immediate awards, contracts where there was only one
available source of materials or labor, classified deals that
involved national security. What no one knew at the beginning of
the war was that the Bush administration had essentially decided to
treat the entire Iraqi theater as an exception to the rules. All you
had to do was get to Iraq and the game was on.
Have Gone
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on August 30, 2007, Printed on August 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60950/
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get
away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger
extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest
O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in
Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air
Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible
for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual
budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years,
becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends
you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the
summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for
Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on
Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've
been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in
Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace,
garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end
neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks
moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On
October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living
that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a
contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design
and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to
house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72
million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one
of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically
useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and
ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar
plumbing in the upper floors.
You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college
in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of
one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of
diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write,
adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently
stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance
dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt."
The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown
splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the
House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them,
your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a
former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of
contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-
minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned
gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an
irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen
how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all
it would be" is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of
a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money
and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your
company's compensation. Touchy subject -- you've got a "cost-
plus" contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of
three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend,
the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But
before this milk-faced congressman can even think about
suggesting that you give these millions back, you've got to cut him
off. "So you won't voluntarily look at this," Van Hollen is mumbling,
"and say, given what has happened in this project … "
"No, sir, I will not," you snap.
"… 'We will return the profits.' …"
"No, sir, I will not," you repeat.
Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home,
take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the
little woman… . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your
president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485
million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of
Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now
assessed at $929,974, and you're sure as hell not giving it back to
anyone.
"Yeah, I don't know what I expected him to say," Van Hollen says
now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the
money back. "It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the
taxpayer, for everything."
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget,
and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient.
George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an
experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully
privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between
essential government services and for-profit enterprises have
been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where
wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear,
where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at
slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in
KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no
matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies
and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that
this is the way someone up there would like things run all over --
not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for
Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to
deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush
administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted
capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the
customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by
the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This
is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-
people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and
laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both
ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military
adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so
that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle
Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on
foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it
lasted. Since time immemorial, the distribution of government
largesse had followed a staid, paper-laden procedure in which the
federal government would post the details of a contract in
periodicals like Commerce Business Daily or, more recently, on the
FedBizOpps Web site. Competitive bids were solicited and
contracts were awarded in accordance with the labyrinthine print of
the U.S. Code, a straightforward system that worked well enough
before the Bush years that, as one lawyer puts it, you could "count
the number of cases of criminal fraud on the fingers of one hand."
There were exceptions to the rule, of course -- emergencies that
required immediate awards, contracts where there was only one
available source of materials or labor, classified deals that
involved national security. What no one knew at the beginning of
the war was that the Bush administration had essentially decided to
treat the entire Iraqi theater as an exception to the rules. All you
had to do was get to Iraq and the game was on.
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