Testimony From Dead American Arms Dealer: 'Sr Officers-Traded Contracts For Huge Bribes'

[kpete]

Dale C. Stoffel, an American contractor in Iraq, described cash delivered in pizza boxes and payoffs dropped in paper sacks.

Military's Iraq Payoff Scandal

Could the familiar story of the Iraq war's early bungled reconstruction effort get any worse? Yes, it could. The military is now investigating its own senior officers, who are suspected of trading contracts for huge bribes. In a dramatic twist, much of the testimony driving the investigation of the in a massive corruption scandal comes posthumously from Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer killed under mysterious circumstances by hostile forces in Iraq in 2004. Stoffel described to officials shady deals in which contractors would deliver tens of thousands of dollars hidden in pizza boxes to military leaders in order to score lucrative reconstruction jobs. The New York Times reports the investigation is focused on two officers who held top positions in distributing reconstruction funds shortly after the invasion—Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force and retired Col. Anthony B. Bell of the Army.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/us-military-in-corruption-scandal/shocking/

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Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on American Officers
By JAMES GLANZ, C.J. CHIVERS and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Published: February 14, 2009

Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.

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Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.

It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.

Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/middleeast/15iraq.html?_r=2&hp

[grannie4peace]

1. gold mine!

[midnight]

2. There is that word again "Bribery". It was the infrastructure

for the republican work formula. No money, no jobs. No money, no contracts. No wonder Bush feels so confident in describing his motto-Money trumps Peace.

[MagickMuffin]

3. pizza, Pizza, PIZZA..... K&RRRRRRR

The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.

“You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances.”

In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers.

Another case that has raised investigators’ suspicions about top contracting officials involves a company, variously known as American Logistics Services and Lee Dynamics International, that repeatedly won construction contracts for millions of dollars despite a dismal track record.

One contracting official committed suicide in 2006 a day after admitting to investigators that she had taken $225,000 in bribes to rig bids in favor of the company. At least two other former contracting officials in Iraq have admitted to taking bribes in the case and are cooperating with investigators. It is unknown what information they may have provided on Colonel Hirtle, a high-ranking contracting official in Baghdad. But Colonel Hirtle signed the company’s first major contract in Iraq in May 2004, a roughly $10 million deal to build arms warehouses for the fledgling Iraqi security forces, according to a copy of the contract and federal officials. The warehouses went largely unbuilt. Investigators said the inquiry into the Lee case was continuing.

I think someone should also investigate Paul Bremer and Jim Wilkerson. I'm sure thye stuffed their pockets, knob nail boots, and duffel bag.

Of course we knew there would be corruption involved with bricks of $100 bills just left with no accounting.


edit: typo

[GuvWurld]

4. War is a racket

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

WAR IS A RACKET

by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient
Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired

CHAPTER ONE

WAR IS A RACKET

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

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