By Pratap Chatterjee, AlterNet
Posted on August 23, 2004

Missing: One giant generator owned by the United States military. Estimated cost: $734,863

Last seen: Somewhere in Iraq.

While much of the media is focused on the pitched battle over the control of the holy shrine in Najaf, a bigger scandal is brewing in Iraq that may well have an equally important effect on the future of the U.S. occupation.

A team of auditors was dispatched to Iraq in late January this year after a string of internal reports showed that the military was wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. They have issued eleven reports since June 25, almost all of which have pointed to the misuse of the money allocated for reconstruction, be it Iraqi or Congress-appropriated funds.

According to two of these reports issued in late July by Stuart Bowen, the auditor-inspector general of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), not only have a full one-third of the items purchased by the Pentagon gone MIA (including the pricey generator), but a whopping. $1.9 billion or more of Iraqi oil revenue has also mysteriously disappeared.

Embarrassed military authorities did eventually track down the missing generator and much of the money, both of which seemed to have ended up with none other than Halliburton. As it turns out they weren’t missing after all; it’s just that Dick Cheney’s former employer had misplaced or conveniently forgotten to turn in the receipts to the correct people.

But the Pentagon was not able to explain just how Halliburton gained possession of Iraqi funds when neither the United States Congress nor the Iraqi government authorized their transfer to Halliburton in the first place. Worse yet, the man who authorized the allocation � CPA chief Paul Bremer � had already quietly left Iraq just as the reports were being released.

Yet days after the much-touted “transfer of sovereignty,” the White House revealed an even more startling detail about the reconstruction effort: In over a year, the CPA had managed to spend just 2 percent of the $18.4 billion earmarked for the immediate reconstruction of Iraq. And not a penny was spent on the two areas where the Iraqi people were suffering the most: healthcare or water and sanitation.

So what is really going on? Is the United States spending too much or too little money in Iraq?

The graphic shows penalties paid in the past four years by contractors handling assignments in Iraq. (AP Graphic)

Mon Apr 26
By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Ten companies with billions of dollars in U.S. contracts for Iraq reconstruction have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage.

The United States is paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on three federal construction projects and banned from U.S. government work during 2002, according to an Associated Press review of government documents.

A Virginia company convicted of rigging bids for American-funded projects in Egypt also has been awarded Iraq contracts worth hundreds of millions. And a third firm found guilty of environmental violations and bid rigging won U.S. Army approval for a subcontract to clean up an Iraqi harbor.

Seven other companies with Iraq reconstruction contracts have agreed to pay financial penalties without admitting wrongdoing. Together, the 10 companies have paid to resolve 30 alleged violations in the past four years. Six paid penalties more than once. But the companies have been awarded $7 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts.

“We have not made firms pay the price when they screw up,” said Peter W. Singer, a former Pentagon official who worked on a task force overseeing military and contract work in the Balkans.

“But it’s not the company’s fault if it has a dumb client. I’m not blaming the companies, I’m blaming the government,” said Singer, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

The contracts are legal because the Bush administration repealed regulations put in place by the Clinton administration that would have allowed officials to bar new government work for companies convicted or penalized during the previous three years.

The following is from January 2001 and contains some errors due to corporate mergers, and may not be completely up to date. If you know of a more updated list please email us at info at vitw dot org

Number of DU patents / Patent Owners

19 WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC CORP
17 HITACHI LTD
17 US ARMY
14 US ENERGY
14 COMMISSARIAT ENERGIE ATOMIQUE
13 TOKIO SHIBAURA ELECTRIC CO
11 STARMET CORP
9 OLIN CORP
8 FRAMATOME & CIE
7 RHEINMETALL GMBH
7 REMET CORP
6 SCHLUMBERGER TECHNOLOGY CORP
6 ELLIOTT GUY R B
6 JERSEY NUCLEAR AVCO ISOTOPES
6 MARWICK EDWARD F
5 SIEMENS AG
5 FRAMATOME SA
5 SCHNEIDER USA INC
4 WESTERN ATLAS INT INC
4 BRITISH NUCLEAR FUELS PLC
4 GEN ELECTRIC
4 NUCLEAR METALS INC
4 PRIMEX TECHNOLOGIES INC
4 UNIV TEXAS
4 US OF AMERICA AS REPRESENTED B

The Corporate Invasion of Iraq-Profile of U.S. Corporations Awarded Contracts in U.S./British-Occupied Iraq (Adobe PDF) prepared by the U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW).
This report profiles eighteen of the most prominent U.S. corporations to which the Bush administration has given large, highly profitable contracts to operate in Iraq. It is well worth reading.

The Wall Street Journal describes it as “the largest government reconstruction effort since Americans helped to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II.” Just how much the rebuilding of Iraq will cost American taxpayers is a figure still too elusive to capture. But, the President’s request for an additional $87 billion in September atop the $3.7 billion a month we are already spending, indicates the final figure will be, as one pundit described it, quite “an adult number.”

Recent estimates now put the final figure somewhere between $200 billion to as much as half a trillion dollars over the next ten years.

America’s Iraq-sticker-shock may turn to anger when taxpayers discover the small group of men and companies reaping the benefits of President Bush’s newly found appreciation for nation building.

While Vice President Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, has attracted most press attention for its Iraq-related contracts, Halliburton is hardly the whole story. Its share is but a slice of the multi-billion dollar pie being divided up among a brotherhood of unusually well connected and economically related individuals and entities.

…the biggest US defense contractors who have cornered critical chunks of defense work have achieved an even more dubious status: TBF/ TBJ - “Too Big to Fail/Too Big to Jail.”

Read the report (Adobe PDF) by Misleader.org. Misleader.org will provide an accurate daily chronicle for journalists of mis-representations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration.