"Oh, the Iraq war. Are you still stuck on that topic?"

[JonLP24]

130. More on the "real reasons"

Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals. You can also see just why the heretofore press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer.

Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr. Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.

Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday. As he told The Wall Street Journal last week, Blackwater no longer cares much about its security business; it is expanding into a “full spectrum” defense contractor offering a “one-stop shop” for everything from remotely piloted blimps to armored trucks. The point of his P.R. offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of Pentagon loot.

Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption.

Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun’s tenure is even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically, black holes: dozens of the report’s passages were redacted, as were the names of many White House officials in the report’s e-mail evidence on the Boeing machinations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=0

The probe quickly focused on contracting officer Major Gloria Davis. On December 11, 2006 CID agents questioned Davis at Camp Victory near the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) after $225,000 was discovered in offshore accounts under her name. According to investigators, the money came from bribes paid to Davis by Kuwait-based Lee Dynamics International, operated by an American contractor named George Lee. That night, after admitting that the money came from bribes, Davis committed suicide.[3][4]

Following up on leads discovered during the investigation on Davis, investigators' attention was drawn to contracting officer Major John Cockerham. That same month, investigators raided Cockerham's Fort Sam Houston home and discovered a ledger detailing $30 million in kickbacks that the officer expected to receive for steering contracts to certain companies.[5]

On July 22, 2007, Cockerham and his wife, Melissa, were arrested. Three days later, Cockerham's sister, Carolyn Blade, was arrested and charged with helping Cockerham collect $3.1 million in bribes. All three were indicted on August 22, 2007 for conspiracy to commit fraud and bribery, conspiracy to obstruct justice and money-laundering conspiracy. The following month investigators recovered $900,000 in bribe money that had been paid to Cockerham.[5]

Prosecutors stated that Melissa and Blake traveled to Kuwait to collect the bribe money and deposited the money into safety deposit boxes. Later, the money was moved into off-shore bank accounts. As of March 2009, not all of the money had been recovered. Prosecutors stated that it appeared that co-conspirators overseas or other Cockerham relatives in the US were hiding the money.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockerham_bribery_case#cite_note-contreras-5

Unlike private contractors Military personnel are held accountable which is what happened to some Army majors & colonels who wanted a slice of the action

Audit: U.S. lost track of $9 billion in Iraq funds

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.

An inspector general's report said the U.S.-led administration that ran Iraq until June 2004 is unable to account for the funds.

"Severe inefficiencies and poor management" by the Coalition Provisional Authority has left auditors with no guarantee the money was properly used," the report said.

<snip>

The $8.8 billion was reported to have been spent on salaries, operating and capital expenditures, and reconstruction projects between October 2003 and June 2004, Bowen's report concluded.

<snip>

Auditors were unable to verify that the Iraqi money was spent for its intended purpose. In one case, they raised the possibility that thousands of "ghost employees" were on an unnamed ministry's payroll.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/01/30/iraq.audit/