Front and center in the Washington Post:
A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”
“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”
That’s another $75 million down the tubes. That’s another year wasted. You really think the Bushies care about spending your tax dollar responsibly? Do you really think they care about winning the peace for the Iraqi people? They don’t. They’re looters. They’re in their sixth year and they’re still just getting started, they’re still blowing off steam.
BTW- Feingold mentioned this Bowen to me on Monday. He said he is a good guy and he’s doing a surprisingly good job, considering he is a BushCo. appointee.
The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.
“The truth needs to be told about what we didn’t get for our dollar from Parsons,” Bowen said.
War profiteering is going to be one area the Dems hit hard in the House next year (if we win the house).
Hitting it hard now might help with the next year. I don’t get the sense that most voters have the slightest clue how corrupt the current batch of Republicans are.
Heard anything about Woodward’s new book coming out?
No, but I have now after a google search. It sounds extremely critical of the administration, but I won’t believe it really is before I see reviews.
It’s not just a matter of incompetence. It is a matter of the failure of Conservatism as an ideology to solve our problems. Conservatism, in the last few years, has been shown to be nothing more than a sink or swim ideology in which the Iraqi people are blamed if they do not solve their own problems. In addition, conservatism’s anti-government ideology has been shown to be lacking because of its notion that Big Government is the problem. This kind of corruption is the direct result of not having a “Big Government” in place to enforce the law and ensure that taxpayer money is properly spent.
I agree that it’s not merely incompetence. I think it’s mostly by design. Grover Norquist on steroids, drowning what’s left of the govt. and it’s ability of oversight in the bathtub. What’s worse though is the fact that they’ve been given a green light too many times along the way by a complacent, and in some instances complicit, opposition. They couldn’t have gotten to where they are without the help of the impotent democrats.
I agree Super. Also, they just voted to give the incompetents another 70 BILLION dollars. What the f**k are they doing with all this money and yet our kids over there still don’t have the equipment they need.
STOP THE INSANITY!! IMPEACH!
via Boston Globe:
(h/t Americablog)
Why would you expect the Dems to hit hard on it if they win when they don’t hit hard on it during the election campaigns? Now is the time.
You wont like the answer.
Because Feingold told me that they are going to hit on it.
[Paraphrasing] He said that there was going to be a lot of resistance to investigations and that people would be saying ‘we don’t want to be seen as doing noting but investigating, investigating, investigating’, but that war profiteering was something everyone could agree on.
They will go after this in a big way. What they do about 9/11, the Ohio elections, torture, pre-war intelligence, etc., may be very disappointing.
If this is going to be such a resonant issue with the public, why aren’t they hitting it now? It is indeed something everybody can agree on. So why aren’t they making it central and loud in the campaigns?
I guess the simple answer to that is cause they are chicken shit assholes afraid to open their sorry mouths and make any real waves. Heaven forbid if the big bad rethugs call them names and unpatriotic..oh yeah they do anyway sooooo I guess they are all just big fraidy cats.
When reading such stories, I find myself questioning assessments that suggest that we have trained nearly 300,000 Iraqi troops. Here’s the problem. If we began our occupation of Iraq with less than 200,000 American soldiers and no Iraqi security forces and we now have nearly 300,000 Iraqi troops along with over 140,000 U.S. soldiers, why can’t we seem to bring order to the country and why does the death toll continue to alarm? Perhaps this story about the police academy, coupled with other failures, provides the answer to my question.
The Bush administration, under the guidance of Donald Rumsfeld, continues to ignore the realities being voiced by numerous former military officers and countless other war critics. It takes minimal analysis to posit that the lack of sufficient forces in the region also translates into a lack of supervision and oversight which then leads to these colossal failures.
Look, the reality is obvious…we have an administration that has miscalculated and mismanaged the Iraq war from the outset. There were no WMD’s, we were not greeted as liberators, we didn’t have a plan for securing the country once Hussein was toppled, we didn’t have enough troops to achieve our objectives, we are in the midst of a civil war, and we are fomenting more extremism. Sadly, the only constant remains the unequivocal denial exhibited by our President and his assemblage of neocon associates.
Read more here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
Welcome Dan. Glad you stepped up to the plate to say your feelings on things. Good comment…stay aboard and say more.