Absolute War Corrupts Absolutely

The Iraq war is a tragedy in so many aspects, it's hard to pick one as worst. But the corruption in contracting and in operation of its many support systems ranks among the rankest.

The army is being forced to look more deeply into the graft because of a personal tragedy, that resulted in suicide, for some vendors who got deeply involved in a corrupt system.

The flashy Laila Tower office building in this wealthy oil capital is a world away from the mean streets of Baghdad. But the U.S. government says they are linked by a web of fraud and bribery that stole millions of dollars provided by American taxpayers to support U.S. combat troops in Iraq.

The U.S. military and prosecutors have launched 83 criminal investigations into alleged contract fraud, including a total of $15 million in bribes.

It was the apparent suicide of an Army major in Baghdad a year ago that brought them to the 15th floor of the Laila Tower. There, overlooking the Persian Gulf, is the firm run by American George H. Lee and his family, a small part of that huge web.

None of the Lees has been charged with any crime. But the Army suspended them from doing business with the U.S. government, and a federal judge in Huntsville, Ala., upheld the order in August, as a military investigation into their case continues.

The case of Lee, a 64-year-old former Army supply clerk from Pennsylvania, provides rare insight into how fraud was able to occur, in part by exploiting the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It also shows the flaws in the U.S. system of bids between private contractors and the U.S. military officers who doled out billions of dollars in contracts since 2003, often with little oversight.

Kuwait's close-knit expatriate community also played a role, in a place where business is traditionally done away from the glare of public scrutiny.

"Bribery and kickbacks are common with big projects," said Ali al-Nemash of the Kuwait Transparency Society, a private organization that seeks to combat graft and corruption. "They call it 'gifts,' but it is bribery."

Teams of U.S. investigators are reviewing a sample of about 6,000 U.S. military contracts worth $2.8 billion that were awarded by a single Army office at Camp Arifjan, a huge logistics and supply base about 40 miles south of the Laila Tower.

The U.S. has publicly identified only some of the companies and individuals linked to the alleged bribery and fraud. The Army cited the need to protect "the integrity of the ongoing investigation" in refusing a request by The Associated Press for an interview at Camp Arifjan.
(snip)
Davis' children are seeking to reverse a government order seizing their mother's bank accounts, which were frozen one day before she was found dead of a gunshot wound in Baghdad.

She and others may have fallen into what Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, referred to as a "culture of corruption" at Camp Arifjan, where about a dozen people gave out contracts worth tens of millions of dollars.

The occupied White House tore down the guards of regulation and loosed the contracting process in seeming confidence that the market would work to keep all the dollars flowing and that would make everybody happy. Corruption, though, is the byproduct of the deregulated system, and it has resulted in poor quality of services to our troops as well as the unbridled throwing our dollars down the drain of graft. That hasn't worked out very well for anyone. Caught up in the crookedness, some of the civilian cogs seem to have gotten crushed.

The helter-skelter nature of the war has shown up the weaknesses in letting contracts through laissez faire methods, and ought to serve as a lesson for all time in how regulation keeps the systems running, and the servers of that system in line so that it can operate.