WASHINGTON — Poor planning, weak oversight and greed combined to soak U.S. taxpayers and undermine American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, government watchdogs tell a new commission examining waste and corruption in wartime contracts.
Since 2003, the Pentagon, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have paid contractors more than $100 billion for goods and services to support war operations and rebuilding.
There are 154 open criminal investigations into allegations of bribery, conflicts of interest, defective products, bid rigging, and theft stemming from the wars, according to Thomas Gimble, the Pentagon’s principal deputy inspector general.
The Associated Press obtained the prepared testimony of Gimble and Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, in advance of today’s first hearing by the Commission on Wartime Contracting.
Congress created the eight- member bipartisan panel a year ago over the objections of the Bush White House, which complained the Justice Department might be forced to disclose sensitive information about investigations.
Gimble said contracting scandals go back to the late 1700s when vendors swindled George Washington’s army.
“Today, instead of empty barrels of meat, contractors produced inadequate or unusable facilities that required extensive rework,” Gimble says.
A report from Bowen, “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” reviews the problems in an effort that has cost the U.S. $51 billion. Before the war, the Bush administration projected $2.4 billion would be needed for reconstruction, he says.
His findings are based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of documents. The U.S. government “was neither prepared for nor able to respond quickly to the ever-changing demands” of stabilizing the war-torn country and rebuilding it, Bowen says.
Styled after the Truman Committee, which examined World War II spending six decades ago, the panel has broad authority to examine military support contracts, reconstruction projects and private security companies.
