Billions of Dollars of Iraq Contracts Never Finished.
Remember all those right-wing propagandists wringing their hands over how the media was not reporting all the good things that were going on in Iraq? Well, it turns out that many of the "good things" -- reconstruction projects that were supposed to get Iraq back on its feet -- never happened. In other words, there was nothing to report.
The audit released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, provides the latest snapshot of an uneven reconstruction effort that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. It also comes as several lawmakers have said they want the Iraqis to pick up more of the cost of reconstruction.
The special IG's review of 47,321 reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars found that at least 855 contracts were terminated by U.S. officials before their completion, primarily because of unforeseen factors such as violence and excessive costs. About 112 of those agreements were ended specifically because of the contractors' actual or anticipated poor performance.
In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children's hospital in Basra, only to "essentially terminate" the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.
And it turns out that rather than terminate projects, the Bush administration would simply modify the contracts and would lie about whether or not they were complete or not. And this will raise even more questions about the kind of work that the Bush administration is performing in Iraq; one of the questions that will be asked is, were contractors whose contracts were terminated due to poor performance later given other contracts?
A vote for John McCain would be a vote for more of the same -- more shoddy management of projects thanks to too many people on the job who think that it is not their problem because government is the problem. Take John McCain's plan to keep us in Iraq for the next 100 years and picture what Iraq would be like -- projects started but never finished, billions of taxpayer dollars that could have been invested in ending our dependence on foreign oil and creating thousands of new jobs going down the black hole of Halliburton, never to return.
Obamathon
