Your Tax Dollars At Work
Buck February 2nd, 2008 - 10:37 amITT Federal Services International, a defense contractor hired to maintain battle gear for U.S. troops in Iraq, repeatedly failed to do the job right.
Combat vehicles ITT declared as repaired and ready for action flunked inspections and had to be fixed again. Equipment to be sanitized for return to the United States was found caked with dirt. And ITT’s computer database for tracking the work was rife with errors.
Formal “letters of concern” were sent to the contractor. Still, the Army didn’t fire ITT. Instead, it gave the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based company more work to do. Since October 2004, ITT has been paid $638 million through the Global Maintenance and Supply Services contract.
[...]“It has just been a mess,” McCaskill, a former state auditor, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s bad enough how much this war is costing. But it’s heartbreaking the amount of money that has just gone up in smoke.”
[...]The office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has 52 open cases related to bribery, false billing, contract fraud, kickbacks and theft; 36 of those cases have been referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, according to the inspector general’s office.
The Army Criminal Investigation Command is busy, too. The command has 90 criminal investigations under way related to alleged contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, according to spokesman Chris Grey. Two dozen U.S. citizens have been charged or indicted so far - 19 of those are Army military and civilian employees - and more than $15 million in bribes has changed hands, Grey said.
Yet Bush, his republican cohorts and the far right fringe of America seems to think health care for children is a huge waste of money.
