accept to the future of government... How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one lay touch extended the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq. You go away off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case as an Air Force civil design a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors with an annual calculate of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years becoming such a military all-star that the Air compel frequently sends you to the Hill to declare before Congress -- until one day in the pass of 2003 when you leave office to take a job as an executive for Parsons a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq. Now you can finally act out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air compel locate and get your wife that conceive of domiciliate you've been promising her all these years. The place on lay Street in Dunn Loring. Virginia looks pretty good -- four bedrooms fireplace store. 2,900 form feet a nice starter domiciliate in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th. 2003 you close the broach for $775,000 and go away living that private-sector good life. A few months later in walk 2004 your affiliate magically wins a assure from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to create by mental act and create the Baghdad guard College a facility that's supposed to house and instruct at least 4,000 guard recruits. But two years and $72 million later you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all measure a practically useless arrange of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in inform and egest a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors. You've done such a terrible job in fact that when auditors from the Special Inspector command for Iraq Reconstruction tour the college in the summer of 2006 their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so beat of diluted urine and feces that it would not direct," they create verbally adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment aggroup member's apparel." The final inform helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy cook blob on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor. When Congress gets wind of the fiasco a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To calm them your company decides to displace you to the forge -- after all you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute go in from the suburbs sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a arrange of shit. You blink. Fuck if you know. "I undergo some conjecture but that's all it would be" is your deadpan say. The dwell twitters in amazement. It's hard not to gesticulate the balls of a man who walks into Congress bunco $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to anticipate where it all might have gone. Next thing you experience the congressman is asking you about your company's compensation. Touchy subject -- you've got a "cost-plus" contract which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even evaluate about suggesting that you give these millions back you've got to cut him off. "So you won't voluntarily be at this," Van Hollen is mumbling. "and say given what has happened in this project. ""No sir. I ordain not," you snap.". 'We ordain return the profits.' . .""No sir. I will not," you repeat. Your testimony over you act out the be of the hearing go home take a bath in one of your four bathrooms move into bed with the little woman. A year later. Iraq is still in flames and your president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the accommodate you bought for $775K is now assessed at $929,974 and you're sure as hell not giving it approve to anyone."Yeah. I don't experience what I expected him to say," Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. "It just shows the contempt they have for us for the taxpayer for everything."Operation Iraqi Freedom it turns out was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal calculate and no occupying compel in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian.
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