Your tax dollars at work.....$40 million for an empty prison in Iraq

[marmar]

AP, via Yahoo!:



Report: Empty prison in Iraq a $40M 'failure'
By BRIAN MURPHY and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writers
Mon Jul 28, 6:26 AM ET



BAGHDAD - In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners. It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.

"It's a bit of a monument in the desert right now because it's not going to be used as a prison," said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office plans to release a report Monday detailing the litany of problems at the vacant detention center in Khan Bani Saad.

The pages also add another narrative to the wider probes into the billions lost so far on scrubbed or substandard projects in Iraq and one of the main contractors accused of failing to deliver, the Parsons construction group of Pasadena, Calif.

"This is $40 million invested in a project with very little return," Bowen told The Associated Press in Washington. "A couple of buildings are useful. Other than that, it's a failure."

In the pecking order of corruption in Iraq, the dead-end prison project at Khan Bani Saad is nowhere near the biggest or most tangled. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_vacant_prison

[predfan]

1. Just a paragraph in the story of the Bush Legacy........

Record deficits left for the next president, environmental disasters left for the next administration, and the absolute squandering of our reputation throughout the world after 9-11.

The perfect opportunity for our country to pursue energy independence when we were all on the same page 7 years ago, but there was way too much money to be made by oil interests if Saddam was out of the way. Now that quandary can be left to the next president, and the bills fall on our children and grandchildren.

Great Job, Dubby.

[erpowers]

2. Blame It on Democrats

How long will it take for the Republicans to try to blame this on the Democrats? You know a party is adverse to taking responsibility for their mistakes when you do not ask if they will blame another party, but how long it will take them to blame the other party.

On Edit

I think some Republicans would be crazy enough to claim that since the prison is empty that shows things are getting better in Iraq. Never mind that the story said that another prison is having problems with overcrowding.