http://www.chicagotribune.com/...hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
Would like to know what the translator knows...if they find him.
Very curious...WASHINGTON -- A U.S. contractor gunned down last month in Iraq had accused Iraqi Defense Ministry officials of corruption days before his death, according to documents and U.S. officials.
Dale Stoffel, 43, was shot to death Dec. 8 shortly after leaving an Iraqi military base north of Baghdad, an attack attributed at the time to Iraqi insurgents. Also killed was a business associate, Joseph Wemple, 49.
The killings came after Stoffel alerted senior U.S. officials in Washington that Iraqi Defense Ministry officials were part of a kickback scheme involving a multimillion-dollar contract awarded to his company, Wye Oak Technology, to refurbish old Iraqi military equipment.
The FBI has launched an investigation into the killings and whether they might have been retaliation for Stoffel's whistle-blowing activities, according to people familiar with the inquiry. The FBI declined to comment.
Stoffel, of Monongahela, Pa., made his allegations in a Dec. 3 letter to a senior Pentagon official and in a meeting with aides to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). Soon after, Stoffel was summoned to the Taji military base in Iraq by coalition military officials to discuss his concerns about his contract. He complained about payment problems with a mysterious Lebanese businessman designated by the Iraqis as a middleman, sources said.
As Stoffel, Wemple and an Iraqi interpreter left the Taji base in a car Dec. 8, another vehicle rammed theirs head-on. Two masked men jumped out and executed the two Americans in a fusillade of bullets, according to news accounts at the time. Their interpreter fled and is missing.
Stoffel's death has prompted new worries about the integrity of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, which has been plagued by accusations of corruption and cronyism almost from the start.
One U.S. official said that corruption problems involving middlemen and kickbacks have become widespread.
Stoffel's killing drew scrutiny from investigators not only because of his whistle-blowing but also because of his mysterious and controversial past. Stoffel worked on a top-secret U.S. program in the 1990s to buy Russian, Chinese and other foreign-made weapons for testing by the U.S. military, according to documents and interviews.
Stoffel's Iraq contract was the first large-scale contract issued and funded directly by the Iraqi government for military purposes. It was crucial for training and equipping the Iraqi army, considered a key to the U.S. strategy for exiting Iraq.
Failing to stop the alleged corruption "will set a very negative precedent for subsequent dealings with the Iraqi military . . . and be the source of embarrassment and political tension to the Bush administration . . . ." said Stoffel's letter to the Pentagon, which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
According to the letter, Stoffel's Pennsylvania-based company was awarded a contract last year by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense to help overhaul its Soviet-era military equipment.
As part of the contract, senior ministry officials required Stoffel's payments to be processed through a Lebanese middleman appointed by the ministry, according to the Dec. 3 letter.
By November, Stoffel was seeking a payment of $24.7 million, submitting invoices directly to the Defense Ministry. The ministry, in turn, cut three separate checks, sending each of them to the Lebanese businessman for "processing," people familiar with the contract said.
The middleman's role was to act as a sort of escrow account for the financial transactions, reconciling invoices and dispensing the payments, sources said.
After the businessman failed to send him the money, Stoffel complained to U.S. officials in Washington that he suspected that the middleman's true role was to route payments back to Iraqi officials in the form of kickbacks, according to people familiar with the contract.
He also told the Pentagon in his letter that the middleman was withholding payments in an attempt to force him to use subcontractors linked to the middleman and to Defense Ministry officials.
Would like to know what the translator knows...if they find him.
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