“Samir Ida, the company's construction director, said that the guard base was completed to "all specifications." He provided an e-mail from an OBO official who described it as "one of the better built camps" in Iraq.”
My money’s on Samir. It is not (as some might think) an untenable position to hold that one of the better built camps would have smoking wires and uninhabitable housing. Actually, most of the better-built-projects in Iraq are of that type, becoming uninhabitable before their grand opening.
America has been consistently pissing money in the direction of Iraq these past four years without even the most minimally competent oversight. Don’t sweat it, Samir. Things are so bad in Iraq that, beyond a newspaper article or two, your screwed-up guard base will go the same route as Rummy’s Star Wars and the Coast Guard’s wasted billions.
We got our own problems. Our National Parks, schools and infrastructure are falling into pieces while hundreds of billions slip through governmental fingers. No one really gives a sh*t. It’s summertime and the livin’ is easy.
While the big issues of American deaths and Cheney’s shell-game with our liberties share the spotlight with Paris Hilton, the real story and the real scandal is the overpowering, unrelenting, inexorable and endless incompetence of this government, at every level (Bush sent everyone home in the contract supervision bureaucracy). He has presided over a 40% reduction in contract supervisors, while there has been a 78% increase in contracts since this nightmare in the Middle East began.
Those who are left are working their butts off sticking fingers in an ever degrading dike.
That’s privatizing. That’s making government smaller and more responsive. Smaller in the number of insiders with their fingers in the pot, more responsive to Samir and General Dynamics.
“Retired Maj. Gen. Charles E. Williams, the director of OBO, who was formerly with the Army Corps of Engineers, declined to be interviewed. "It is internal business," said his special assistant, Phyllis A. Patten-Breeding.”
Internal business as usual.
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