The
Great Iraq Swindle
By Rolling Stone
Magazine
28 August, 2007
Rolling
Stone
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.
But getting there wasn't
easy. To travel to Iraq, would-be contractors needed permission from
the Bush administration, which was far from blind in its appraisal of
applicants. In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House
originally installed a clown named Jim O'Beirne at the relevant evaluation
desk in the Department of Defense. O'Beirne proved to be a classic Bush
villain, a moron's moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills
or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent
a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the
reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate
of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting
experience to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who
had served as Michigan's community-health director under a GOP governor,
was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system and decided
that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country
most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.
Town-selectmen types like
Haveman weren't the only people who got passes to enter Iraq in the
first few years. The administration also greenlighted brash, modern-day
forty-niners like Scott Custer and Mike Battles, a pair of ex-Army officers
and bottom-rank Republican pols (Battles had run for Congress in Rhode
Island and had been a Fox News commentator) who had decided to form
a security company called Custer Battles and make it big in Iraq. "Battles
knew some people from his congressional run, and that's how they
got there," says Alan Grayson, an attorney who led a whistle-blower
lawsuit against the pair for defrauding the government.
Before coming to Iraq, Custer
Battles hadn't done even a million dollars in business. The company's
own Web site brags that Battles had to borrow cab fare from Jordan to
Iraq and arrived in Baghdad with less than $500 in his pocket. But he
had good timing, arriving just as a security contract for Baghdad International
Airport was being "put up" for bid. The company site raves
that Custer spent "three sleepless nights" penning an offer
that impressed the CPA enough to hand the partners $2 million in cash,
which Battles promptly stuffed into a duffel bag and drove to deposit
in a Lebanese bank.
Custer Battles had lucked
into a sort of Willy Wonka's paradise for contractors, where a small
pool of Republican-friendly businessmen would basically hang around
the Green Zone waiting for a contracting agency to come up with a work
order. In the early days of the war, the idea of "competition"
was a farce, with deals handed out so quickly that there was no possibility
of making rational or fairly priced estimates. According to those familiar
with the process, contracting agencies would request phony "bids"
from several contractors, even though the winner had been picked in
advance. "The losers would play ball because they knew that eventually
it would be their turn to be the winner," says Grayson.
To make such deals legal,
someone in the military would simply sign a piece of paper invoking
an exception. "I know one guy whose business was buying weapons
on the black market for contractors," says Pratap Chatterjee, a
writer who has spent months in the Mideast researching a forthcoming
book on Iraq contracts. "It's illegal -- but he got military people
to sign papers allowing him to do it."
The system not only had the
advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged
the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles,
who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts
practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer
claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together
was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general
of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write
over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors
and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented
it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."
The deal charged Custer Battles
with the responsibility to perform airport security for civilian
flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport
during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing
an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given
scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced
canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As
for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog
did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was
brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse
to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor
performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.
Like most contractors, Custer
Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were
guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by
officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government
millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled.
In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways
forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company
markings and billed them to U.S. taxpayers as new equipment. Every
time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money
around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash
as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis,
a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer
Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for
a little while."
The Custer Battles show only
ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA
officials -- a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair's phony
invoicing. "It was the worst case of fraud I've ever seen, hands
down," says Grayson. "But it's also got to be the first instance
in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence
of the crime."
But even being the clumsiest
war profiteers of all time was not enough to bring swift justice
upon the heads of Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles -- and this is where the
story of America's reconstruction effort gets really interesting. The
Bush administration not only refused to prosecute the pair -- it actually
tried to stop a lawsuit filed against the contractors by whistle-blowers
hoping to recover the stolen money. The administration argued that Custer
Battles could not be found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government
because the CPA was not part of the U.S. government. When the lawsuit
went forward despite the administration's objections, Custer and Battles
mounted a defense that recalled Nuremberg and Lt. Calley, arguing that
they could not be guilty of theft since it was done with the government's
approval.
The jury disagreed, finding
Custer Battles guilty of ripping off taxpayers. But the verdict was
set aside by T.S. Ellis III, a federal judge who cited the administration's
"the CPA is not us" argument. The very fact that private contractors,
aided by the government itself, could evade conviction for what even
Ellis, a Reagan-appointed judge, called "significant" evidence
of fraud, says everything you need to know about the true nature of
the war we are fighting in Iraq. Is it really possible to bilk
American taxpayers for repainted forklifts stolen from Iraqi Airways
and claim that you were just following orders? It is, when your commander
in chief is George W. Bush. font size="3">There isn't a
brazen, two -bit, purse-snatching money caper you can think of that
didn't happen at least 10,000 times with your tax dollars in Iraq. At
the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed
as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the
country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden
pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors,
he'd have agents go to the various stashes -- a pile of $200 million
in one of Saddam's former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who
left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out
to lunch -- withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the
bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the
money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million
he'd withdrawn. Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting
documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry
that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts
to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870
magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly
noted, "suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash."
In short, some $8.8 billion
of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right
mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry
Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's
exactly what our government did."
Because contractors were
paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend
to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the
former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even
encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been
exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything
from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging
the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong,
KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds
of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army
no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. "They
did not have the proper wrench to change the tire," an Iraq vet
named Richard Murphy told investigators, "so the decision was made
to torch the truck."
In perhaps the ultimate example
of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back
and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the
lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer
for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that
the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as "sailboat
fuel."
In Fallujah, where the company
was paid based on how many soldiers used the base rec center, KBR supervisors
ordered employees to juke the head count by taking an hourly tally of
every soldier in the facility. "They were counting the same soldier
five, six, seven times," says Linda Warren, a former postal worker
who was employed by KBR in Fallujah. "I was even directed to count
every empty bottle of water left behind in the facility as though they
were troops who had been there."
Yet for all the money KBR
charged taxpayers for the rec center, it didn't provide much in the
way of services to the soldiers engaged in the heaviest fighting of
the war. When Warren ordered a karaoke machine, the company gave her
a cardboard box stuffed with jumbled-up electronic components. "We
had to borrow laptops from the troops to set up a music night,"
says Warren, who had a son serving in Fallujah at the time. "These
boys needed R&R more than anything, but the company wouldn't spend
a dime." (KBR refused requests for an interview, but has denied
that it inflated troop counts or committed other wrongdoing in Iraq.)
One of the most dependable
methods for burning taxpayer funds was simply to do nothing. After securing
a contract in Iraq, companies would mobilize their teams, rush them
into the war zone and then wait, citing the security situation or delayed
paperwork -- all the while charging the government for housing, meals
and other expenses. Last year, a government audit of twelve major contracts
awarded to KBR, Parsons and other companies found that idle time often
accounted for more than half of a contract's total costs. In one deal
awarded to KBR, the company's "indirect" administrative costs
were $52.7 million, and its direct costs -- the costs associated with
the actual job -- were only $13.4 million.
Companies jacked up the costs
even higher by hiring out layers of subcontractors to do their work
for them. In some cases, each subcontractor had its own cost-plus arrangement.
"We called those 'cascading contracts,' " says Rep. Van Hollen.
"Each subcontractor piles on a lot of costs, and eventually they
would snowball into a huge payout. It was a green light for waste."
In March 2004, Parsons --
the firm represented by Earnest O. Robbins -- was given nearly $1 million
to build a fire station in Ainkawa, a small Christian community in one
of the safest parts of Iraq. Parsons subcontracted the design to a British
company called TPS Consult and the construction to a California firm
called Innovative Technical Solutions Inc. ITSI, in turn, hired an Iraqi
outfit called Zozik to do the actual labor.
A year and a half later,
government auditors visited the site and found that the fire station
was less than half finished. What little had been built was marred by
serious design flaws, including concrete columns so shoddily constructed
that they were riddled with holes that looked like "honeycombing."
But getting the fuck-ups fixed proved problematic. The auditors "made
a request that was sent to the Army Corps, which delivered it to Parsons,
who then asked ITSI, which asked TPS Consult to check on the work done
by Zozik," writes Chatterjee, who describes the mess in his forthcoming
book, Baghdad Bonanza. The multiple layers of subcontractors made it
almost impossible to resolve the issue -- and every day the delays dragged
on meant more money for the companies.
Sometimes the government
simply handed out money to companies it made up out of thin air. In
2006, the Army Corps of Engineers found itself unable to award contracts
by the September deadline imposed by Congress, meaning it would have
to "de-obligate" the money and return it to the government.
Rather than suffer that awful fate, the corps obligated $362 million
-- spread out over ninety-six different contracts -- to "Dummy
Vendor." In their report on the mess, auditors noted that money
to nobody "does not constitute proper obligations."
But even obligating money
to no one was better than what sometimes happened in Iraq: handing out
U.S. funds to the enemy. Since the beginning of the war, rumors have
abounded about contractors paying protection money to insurgents to
avoid attacks. No less an authority than Ahmed Chalabi, the head of
the Iraqi National Congress, claimed that such payoffs are a "significant
source" of income for Al Qaeda. Moreover, when things go missing
in Iraq -- like bricks of $100 bills, or weapons, or trucks -- it is
a fair assumption that some of the wayward booty ends up in the wrong
hands. In July, a federal audit found that 190,000 weapons are missing
in Iraq -- nearly one out of every three arms supplied by the United
States. "These weapons almost certainly ended up on the black market,
where they are repurchased by insurgents," says Chatterjee. font
size="3">For all the creative ways that contractors came
up with to waste, mismanage and steal public money in Iraq, the standard
remained good old-fashioned fucking up. Take the case of the Basra Children's
Hospital, a much-ballyhooed "do-gooder" project championed
by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. This was exactly the sort of grandstanding,
self-serving, indulgent and ultimately useless project that tended to
get the go-ahead under reconstruction. Like the expensive telephone-based
disease-notification database approved for use in hospitals without
telephones, or the natural-gas-powered electricity turbines greenlighted
for installation in a country without ready sources of natural gas,
the Basra Children's Hospital was a state-of-the-art medical facility
set to be built in a town without safe drinking water. "Why build
a hospital for kids, when the kids have no clean water?" said Rep.
Jim Kolbe, a Republican from Arizona.
Bechtel was given $50 million
to build the hospital -- but a year later, with the price tag soaring
to $169 million, the company was pulled off the project without a single
bed being ready for use. The government was unfazed: Bechtel, explained
USAID spokesman David Snider, was "under a 'term contract,' which
means their job is over when their money ends."
Their job is over when their
money ends. When I call Snider to clarify this amazing statement, he
declines to discuss the matter further. But if you look over the history
of the Iraqi reconstruction effort, you will find versions of this
excuse everywhere. When Custer Battles was caught delivering broken
trucks to the Army, a military official says the company told him, "We
were only told we had to deliver the trucks. The contract doesn't say
they had to work."
Such excuses speak to a monstrous
vacuum of patriotism; it would be hard to imagine contractors being
so blithely disinterested in results during World War II, where every
wasted dollar might mean another American boy dead from gangrene in
the Ardennes. But the rampant waste of money and resources also suggests
a widespread contempt for the ostensible "purpose" of our
presence in Iraq. Asked to cast a vote for the war effort, contractors
responded by swiping everything they could get their hands on -- and
the administration's acquiescence in their thievery suggests that it,
too, saw making a buck as the true mission of the war. Two witnesses
scheduled to testify before Congress against Custer Battles ultimately
declined not only because they had received death threats but because
they, too, were contractors and feared that they would be shut out of
future government deals. To repeat: Witnesses were afraid to testify
in an effort to recover government funds because they feared reprisal
from the government.
The Bush administration's
lack of interest in recovering stolen funds is one of the great scandals
of the war. The White House has failed to litigate a single case against
a contractor under the False Claims Act and has not sued anybody for
breach of contract. It even declined to join in a lawsuit filed by whistle-blowers
who are accusing KBR of improper invoicing in Fallujah. "For all
the Bush administration claims to do in the war against terrorism,"
Grayson said in congressional testimony, "it is a no-show in the
war against war profiteers." In nearly five years of some of the
worst graft and looting in American history, the administration has
recovered less than $6 million.
What's more, when anyone
in the government tried to question what contractors were up to with
taxpayer money, they were immediately blackballed and treated like an
enemy. Take the case of Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, an outspoken
and energetic woman of sixty-three who served as the chief procurement
executive for the Army Corps of Engineers. In her position, Greenhouse
was responsible for signing off on sole-source contracts -- those awarded
without competitive bids and thus most prone to corruption. Long before
Iraq, she had begun to notice favoritism in the awarding of contracts
to KBR, which was careful to recruit executives who had served in the
military. "That was why I joined the corps: to stop this kind of
clubby contracting," she says.
A few weeks before the Iraq
War started, Greenhouse was asked to sign off on the contract to
restore Iraqi oil. The deal, she noticed, was suspicious on a number
of fronts. For one thing, the company that had designed the project,
KBR, was the same company that was being awarded the contract -- a highly
unusual and improper situation. For another, the corps wanted to award
a massive "emergency" contract to KBR with no competition
for up to five years, which Greenhouse thought was crazy. Who ever heard
of a five-year emergency? After auditing the deal, the Pentagon found
that KBR had overcharged the government $61 million for fuel. "The
abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR," Greenhouse testified
before the Senate, "represents the most blatant and improper contract
abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."
And how did her superiors
in the Pentagon respond to the wrongdoing highlighted by their own chief
procurement officer? First they gave KBR a waiver for the overbilling,
blaming the problem on an Iraqi subcontractor. Then they dealt with
Greenhouse by demoting her and cutting her salary, citing a negative
performance review. The retaliation sent a clear message to any would-be
whistle-blowers. "It puts a chill on you," Greenhouse says.
"People are scared stiff."
They were scared stiff in
Iraq, too, and for good reason. When civilian employees complained about
looting or other improprieties, contractors sometimes threatened to
throw them outside the gates of their bases -- a life-threatening situation
for any American. Robert Isakson, a former FBI agent who worked for
Custer Battles, says that when he refused to go along with one scam
involving a dummy company in Lebanon, he was detained by company security
guards, who seized his ID badge and barred him from the base in Baghdad.
He eventually had to make a hazardous, Papillon-esque journey across
hostile Iraq to Jordan just to survive. (Custer Battles denies the charge.)
James Garrison, who worked
at a KBR ice plant in Al Asad, recalls an incident when Indian employees
threatened to go on strike: "They pulled a bus up, got them in
there and said, 'We'll ship you outside the front gate if you want to
go on strike.' " Not surprisingly, the workers changed their mind
about a work stoppage.
You know the old adage: You
don't pay a hooker to spend the night, you pay her to leave in the morning.
That maxim also applies to civilian workers in Iraq. A soldier is a
citizen with rights, a man to be treated with honor and respect as a
protector of us all; if one loses a limb, you've got to take care of
him, in theory for his whole life. But a mercenary is just another piece
of equipment you can bill to the taxpayer: If one is hurt on the job,
you can just throw it away and buy another one. Today there are more
civilians working for private contractors in Iraq than there are troops
on the ground. The totality of the thievery in Iraq is such that even
the honor of patriotic service has been stolen -- we've replaced soldiers
and heroes with disposable commodities, men we expected to give
us a big bang for a buck and to never call us again.
Russell Skoug, who worked
as a refrigeration technician for a contractor called Wolfpack, found
that out the hard way. These days Skoug is back home in Diboll, Texas,
and he doesn't move around much; he considers it a big accomplishment
if he can make it to his mailbox and back once a day. "I'm doing
a lot if I can do that much," he says, laughing a little.
A year ago, on September
11th, Skoug was working for Wolfpack at a base in Heet, Iraq. It was
a convoy day -- trucks braved the trip in and out of the base every
third day -- and Skoug had a generator he needed to fix. So he agreed
to make a run to Al Asad. "If I would've realized that it was September
11th, I never would've went out," he says. It would turn out to
be the last run he would ever make in Iraq.
An Air Force vet, Skoug had
come to Iraq as a civilian to repair refrigeration units and air conditioners
for a KBR subcontractor called LSI. But when he arrived, he discovered
that LSI had hired him to fix Humvees. "I didn't know jack-squat
about Humvees," he says. "I could maybe change the oil, that
was it." (Asked about Skoug's additional assignment, KBR boasted:
"Part of the reason for our success is our ability to employ individuals
with multiple capabilities.")
Working with him on his crew
were two other refrigeration technicians, neither of whom knew anything
about fixing Humvees. Since Skoug and most of his co-workers had worked
for KBR in Afghanistan, they were familiar with cost-plus contracting.
The buzz around the base was that cost-plus was the reason LSI was hiring
air-conditioning guys to work on unfamiliar military equipment at a
cost to the taxpayer of $80,000 a year. "They was doing the same
thing as KBR: just filling the body count," says Skoug.
Thanks to low troop levels,
all the military repair guys had been pressed into service to fight
the war, so Skoug was forced to sit in the military storeroom on the
base and study vehicle manuals that, as a civilian, he wasn't allowed
to check out of the building. That was how America fought terrorism
in Iraq: It hired civilian air-conditioning techs to fix Humvees using
the instruction manual while the real Humvee repairmen, earning a third
of what the helpless civilians were paid, drove around in circles outside
the wire waiting to get blown up by insurgents.
After much pleading and cajoling,
Skoug managed to convince LSI to let him repair some refrigeration units.
But it turned out that the company didn't have any tools for the job.
"They gave me a screwdriver and a Leatherman, and that's it,"
he recalls. "We didn't even have freon gauges." When Skoug
managed to scrounge and cannibalize parts to get the job done, he impressed
the executives at Wolfpack enough to hire him away from LSI for $10,000
a month. The job required Skoug, who had been given no formal security
training, to travel regularly on dangerous convoys between bases. Wolfpack
issued him an armored vehicle, a Yugoslav-made AK-47 and a handgun,
and wished him luck.
For nearly a year, Skoug
did the job, trying at each stop to overcome the hostility that many
troops felt for civilian contractors who surfed the Internet and played
pool and watched movies all day for big dollars while soldiers carrying
seventy-pound packs of gear labored in huts with broken air conditioning
the civilian techs couldn't be bothered to repair. "They'd have
the easiest thing to fix, and they wouldn't do it," Skoug says.
"They'd write that they'd fixed it or that they just needed a part
and then just leave it." At Haditha Dam, Skoug witnessed a near-brawl
after some Marines, trying to get some sleep after returning from patrol,
couldn't get a group of "KBR dudes" to turn down the television
in a common area late at night.
Toward the end of Skoug's
stay, insurgent activity in his area increased to the point where the
soldiers leading his convoys would often drive only at night and without
lights. Skoug and his co-workers asked Wolfpack to provide them with
night-vision goggles that cost as little as $1,000 a pair, but the company
refused. "Their attitude was, we don't need 'em and we're not buying
'em," says Thomas Lane, a Wolfpack employee who served as Skoug's
security man on the night of September 11th.
On that evening, the soldiers
leading the convoy refused to let Skoug drive his own vehicle back to
Heet without night-vision goggles. So a soldier took Skoug's car, and
Skoug was forced to be a passenger in a military vehicle. "We start
out the front gate, and I find out that the truck that I was in was
the frickin' lead truck," he recalls. "And I'm going, 'Oh,
great.' "
The bomb went off about a
half-hour later, ripping through the truck floor and destroying four
inches of Skoug's left femur. "The windshield looked like there
was a film on it," he says. "I find out later it was a film
-- it was blood and meat and stuff all over the windshield on the inside."
Skoug was loaded into the back of a Humvee, his legs hanging out, and
evacuated to an Army hospital in Germany before being airlifted back
to the States.
When Skoug arrived, it was
his wife, Linda, who had to handle all his affairs. She was the one
who arranged for an air ambulance to take him to Houston, where she
had persuaded an orthopedic hospital to admit him as a patient. She
had to do this because almost right from the start, Wolfpack washed
its hands of Russell Skoug. The insurance policy he had been given turned
out to be useless -- the company denied all coverage, beginning with
a $72,597 bill for his stay in the German hospital. Despite assurances
from Wolfpack chief Mark Atwood that he would cover all Skoug's expenses,
neither he nor the insurance company would pay for the $16,000 trip
in the air ambulance. Nobody paid for the operations Skoug had in Houston
-- as many as three a day, every day for a month. And nobody paid for
his subsequent rehab stint in another Houston hospital -- despite the
fact that military law requires every company contracting with the government
to fully insure all of its employees in the war zone.
Now that he's out, sitting
at home on his couch with only partial use of his left hand and left
leg, Skoug has a stack of unpaid medical bills almost three inches tall.
As he speaks, he keeps fidgeting. He apologizes, explaining that he
can't sit still for very long. Why? Because Skoug can no longer afford
pain medication. "I take ibuprofen sometimes," he says, "but
basically I just grin and bear it."
And here's where this story
turns into something perfectly symbolic of everything that the war in
Iraq stands for, a window into the soul of for-profit contractors who
not only left behind a breathtaking legacy of fraud, waste and corruption
but, through their calculating, greed-fueled hijacking of this generation's
broadest and most far-reaching foreign-policy initiative, pushed America
into previously unknown realms of moral insanity. When I contact Mark
Atwood and ask him to explain how he could watch one of his best employees
get blown up and crippled for life, and then cut him loose with debts
totaling well over half a million dollars, Atwood, safe in his office
in Kuwait City and contentedly suckling at the taxpayer teat, decides
that answering this one question is just too much to ask of poor old
him.
"Right now," Atwood
says, "I just want some peace."
When Linda Skoug petitioned
Atwood for help, he refused, pointing out that he had kept his now-useless
employee on the payroll for four whole months before firing him. "After
I have put forth to help you all out," he wrote in an e-mail, "you
are going to get on me for your husband not having insurance."
He even implied that Skoug had brought the accident upon himself by
allowing the Army to place him at the head of the convoy: "He was
not even suppose [sic] to be in the lead vehicle to begin with."
And that, ladies and gentlemen,
is the story of the Iraq War in a nutshell. In the history of balls,
the world has never seen anything like the private contractors George
W. Bush summoned to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Collectively,
they are the final, polished result of 231 years of natural selection
in the crucible of American capitalism: a bureaucrat class capable of
stealing the same dollar twice -- once from the taxpayer and once from
a veteran in a wheelchair.
The explanations that contractors
offer for all the missing dollars, all the myriad ways they looted the
treasury and screwed guys like Russell Skoug, rank among the most diabolical,
shameless, tongue-twisting bullshit in history. Going back over the
various congressional hearings and trying to decipher the corporate
responses to the mountains of thefts and fuck-ups is a thrilling intellectual
journey, not unlike tackling the Pharaonic hieroglyphs or the mating
chatter of colobus monkeys. Standing before Congress, contractors and
the officials who are supposed to monitor them say things like "As
long as we have the undefinitized contract issue that we have . . .
we will continue to see the same kinds of sustension rates" (translation:
We can't get back any of the fucking money) and "The need for to-fitnessization
was viewed as voluntary, and that was inaccurate as the general counsel
to the Army observed in a June opinion" (translation: The contractor
wasn't aware that he was required to keep costs down) and "If we
don't know where we're trying to go and don't have measures, then we
won't know how much longer it's going to take us to get there"
(translation: There never was a plan in place, other than to let contractors
rip off every dollar they could).
According to the most reliable
estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war,
as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what
did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming
shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across
the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches.
For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is
always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency,
beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted
by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all
have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do
its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's
the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no
cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated
Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.