We, the taxpayers, have spent billions and billions of our bucks and billions and billions of so-called “man hours” on the so-called “reconstruction” of Iraq project. Yet, to date, the frigging POWER GRID isn’t even fully restored or functional in many areas. By now one would expect to see running water and power in every village with all of the pallets of (oftentimes unnacounted for) American dollars being sent to “The Desert”, yet, this is far from the case. Do you smell corruption? I do…
From The Washington Post:
Op-Ed Columnist
Suicide Is Not PainlessBy FRANK RICH
IT was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.
Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.
Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle. …”
(Snip!)
“… Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer.
Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr. Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.
Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday. …”
(Snip!)
“… The point of his P.R. offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of Pentagon loot.
Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption. …”
(Snip!)
“… Much has been made of Erik Prince and his family’s six-digit contributions to Republican candidates and lifelong connections to religious-right power brokers like James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Mr. Prince maintains that these contacts had nothing to do with Blackwater’s growth from tiny start-up to billion-dollar federal contractor in the Bush years. …”
(Snip!)
“… As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.) …”
Scathing. For those who do seek the TRUTH, Mr. Rich’s WaPo article is a “must read”…
As a taxpaying Citizen of the United States of America, it is a helpless feeling to sit here and watch such corruption unravel courtesy of all the money the “Gub’mint” takes from my paychecks every couple of weeks. I almost feel like an accessory to the HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS being committed by the Bush Administration; like both the President and myself should be standing before the judge, awaiting our sentences. But the corruption continues and I feel there is nothing more I can do than write my opinions on this blog and continue to call for the impeachment of President Bush; for the investigations of the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, most of our “Three Letter Agencies”, Congress, and even the so-called “investigators” themselves.
It is unbelievable to me that a small handful of my fellow Americans support such a corrupt arrangement between our Democratic Republic Oligarchy and these “do nothing” private companies such as Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and the rest of them. We can afford to drop pallets full of dollars — BILLIONS of dollars — into Iraq to simply disappear into thin air, but we can’t afford to insure every American child has access to preventative health care. “It’s too expensive” I keep hearing. It’s NOT too expensive as long as we can finance the debacle in Iraq, I say. I will point out, I did OPPOSE the latest attempt by Congress to provide health care to needy children, not for “kicks”, but for the fact the proposed financing of the program was a bit, too thin and a bit too discriminatory — just a “P.S.” there for the readers.
Again — do you feel helpless? I sure do. We have a corrupt Administration that simply does what they please — damn the law; a Congress who refuses to impeach the head of the proverbial “snake”, and a field of hawkish, authoritarian, neoconservative front-runners — BOTH sides of the aisle — for the 2008 Presidential race to choose from. In other words, there is really no end in sight to the criminal atrocities and corruption we, as taxpayers, must apparently continue to be FORCED to finance and endure. Meanwhile, outside nations and peoples continue to blame we average, ordinary American Citizens for the atrocities of our government because they still perceive this country to be the shining example of a Democracy where the common man can actually reverse such corruption. They do not realize the power of our Democracy has been transferred to the corporations from We, The People. One look at the 2008 front-runners, chosen by the two major parties themselves, should be enough to ram this point through to the rest of the world.
Attention, fellow world citizens: look at the polls (source: RealClearPolitics). We don’t care much for these VERMIN who have taken over the once Democratic Republic of our Founding Fathers.
***
A big thanks to our good friend Libby Spencer of The Newshoggers for linking to this article…
See also (courtesy of MemeOrandum): The Middle Earth Journal (my friend Ron Beasley)
Loading ...
10:47 am on October 21st, 2007 1
[...] Clark Never Has So Much Money Been Spent For So Few Results » This Summary is from an article posted at The Gun Toting Liberal™ — Slightly left of center… [...]
6:59 pm on October 21st, 2007 2
“For those who do seek the TRUTH, Mr. Rich’s WaPo article…”
If you are truly interested in the truth, especially the truth about the so-called “war on terror”, read the following:
Even the N.I.S.T. admitted that the Twin Towers “collapsed” at freefall rate. People in the reality-based community should have no problem whatsoever in realizing that the uppermost portion of a skyscraper is not going to be able to “fall” into and THROUGH the remaining vast majority of solid building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly as falling through air without something else (i.e. explosives) reducing said majority of building to such a state of offering no more resistance than air. Can we all agree on that? Sounds pretty straightforward; solid things offer vastly more resistance than air. Anyone who graduated elementary school SHOULD be able to grasp this, and SHOULD be able to therefore grasp that the Twin Towers and WTC # 7 building had to have been controlled demolitions. It is literally COMMON SENSE.
Add to that the fact that “Al Qaeda” isn’t in control of the U.S. Air Force so they certainly wouldn’t be able to make it stand down while they reach their targets. Add to that the “hijackers” (patsies) not being able to even fly small propellor planes worth a damn, yet we are supposed to believe they jumped in the cockpit of these Boeing 757s and -767s and flew them like pro pilots? Come on. These guys also weren’t Muslim enough to sacrifice their own lives; they drank liquor like fish, snorted cocaine, got lapdances at strip clubs, some lived with their girlfriends; what they sound more like are C.I.A. assets who thought they were in training to become drug pilots. Remember all that time they spent in Florida? Then consider the people like Willie Brown, some DoD generals etc. who were warned in advance to not fly that day. Then consider that SOMEBODY placed record amounts of “put” options on the stocks of companies that would be directly affected by 9/11, and placed the “put” options on the stock in the week BEFORE 9/11, meaning they knew what was about to happen. Then consider Bush’s Secret Service allowing him to remain in Booker Elementary school for at least 35 minutes after Andy Card told him that there had been a second crash at the Twin Towers, that “we’re under attack”. They SHOULD have IMMEDIATELY whisked Bush out of there to a safer location. Instead they let him remain there and even to carry out his pre-announced press conference! The only way they could have been so confident to assume that Bush wasn’t even a POSSIBLE target would be if they knew the target list beforehand, meaning 9/11 had to have been an inside job. These and many more pieces of evidence all point to one inescapable conclusion: 9/11 was a false flag attack done by the U.S. against its own people, to provide a pretext for their resource wars, commonly called the “war on terror”. Wake up from your slumber America, before it’s too late. Many already are waking up. Don’t be the last ones on the school bus to figure out that Santa Claus isn’t real.
10:31 pm on October 21st, 2007 3
I don’t know, Guns, while it hasn’t been as rapid a flushing of cash, the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty MUST each have eaten up more than than our FUBAR in Iraq.
9:30 am on October 22nd, 2007 4
Good point, Joe! They’re all just big cash pits with zero return on the invested dollar…