http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7306162/site/newsweek/
The firm double-billed for salaries and repainted the Iraqi Airways forklifts they found at Baghdad airport?which Custer Battles was contracted to secure?then leased them back to the U.S. government, the complaint says. In the fall of 2004, Deputy General Counsel Steven Shaw of the Air Force asked that the firm be banned from future U.S. contracts, saying Custer Battles had also "created sham companies, whereby [it] fraudulently increased profits by inflating its claimed costs." An Army inspector general, Col. Richard Ballard, concluded as early as November 2003 that the security outfit was incompetent and refused to obey Joint Task Force 7 orders: "What we saw horrified us," Ballard wrote to his superiors in an e-mail obtained by NEWSWEEK.
Why hasn't the administration joined the case? It has argued privately that the occupation government, known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, was a multinational institution, not an arm of the U.S. government. So the U.S. government was not technically defrauded. Lawyers for the whistle-blowers point out, however, that President George W. Bush signed a 2003 law authorizing $18.7 billion to go to U.S. authorities in Iraq, including the CPA, "as an entity of the United States government." And several contracts with Custer Battles refer to the other party as "the United States of America."
The Bush administration and Alberto Gonzales are making the claim that the CPA is not part of the US government, therefore any corrupt American contractors will ultimately be answerable to no one because there is no court that could try them.
Good things in Iraq belong to Bush, and the burden for all the bad things belong to the American people, it's our taxpayer money being stolen there and the Republicans want absolutely nothing to do with it. Thank you!
The firm double-billed for salaries and repainted the Iraqi Airways forklifts they found at Baghdad airport?which Custer Battles was contracted to secure?then leased them back to the U.S. government, the complaint says. In the fall of 2004, Deputy General Counsel Steven Shaw of the Air Force asked that the firm be banned from future U.S. contracts, saying Custer Battles had also "created sham companies, whereby [it] fraudulently increased profits by inflating its claimed costs." An Army inspector general, Col. Richard Ballard, concluded as early as November 2003 that the security outfit was incompetent and refused to obey Joint Task Force 7 orders: "What we saw horrified us," Ballard wrote to his superiors in an e-mail obtained by NEWSWEEK.
Why hasn't the administration joined the case? It has argued privately that the occupation government, known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, was a multinational institution, not an arm of the U.S. government. So the U.S. government was not technically defrauded. Lawyers for the whistle-blowers point out, however, that President George W. Bush signed a 2003 law authorizing $18.7 billion to go to U.S. authorities in Iraq, including the CPA, "as an entity of the United States government." And several contracts with Custer Battles refer to the other party as "the United States of America."
The Bush administration and Alberto Gonzales are making the claim that the CPA is not part of the US government, therefore any corrupt American contractors will ultimately be answerable to no one because there is no court that could try them.
Good things in Iraq belong to Bush, and the burden for all the bad things belong to the American people, it's our taxpayer money being stolen there and the Republicans want absolutely nothing to do with it. Thank you!
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