This is just plain embarrassing, and when you add in the other instances of the same, it's embarrassing at the level of Joseph Mobutu embarrassing...
Geez--a classically corrupt politician of, say, the Louisiana variety would find it insulting to be lumped in with crooks like those in the Cheney administration...here in the Gret Stet, citizens at least receive some measure of goods and/or services in exchange for what amounts to chump change when compared to the Cheney Administration wholesale looting of public money...for which we've received less than nothing...thousands of battlefield casualties and billions of dollars wasted...
The State Department so badly managed a $1.2 billion contract for Iraqi police training that it can't tell what it got for the money spent, a new report says.
Because of disarray in invoices and records on the project -- and because the government is trying to recoup money paid inappropriately to contractor DynCorp International, LLC -- auditors have temporarily suspended their effort to review the contract's implementation, said Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr.
Bowen had been trying to review a February 2004 contract to DynCorp awarded by the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). The company was to provide housing, food, security, facilities, training support, law enforcement staff with various specialties as well as weapons and armor for personnel assigned to the program.
"I guess it's a familiar theme," Bowen said Monday, in that problems have previously been documented with both DynCorp and the agency overseeing the contract.
Although training has been conducted and equipment provided under the contract, the bureau is in the process of trying to organize and validate invoices and does not believe its records accurately show the reasons for most payments that were made, the report said.
"As a result, INL does not know specifically what it received for most of the $1.2 billion in expenditures under its DynCorp contract for the Iraqi Police Training Program," Bowen said in a new 18-page report.
The contract, now in its third year, is to support training programs in Iraq and Afghanistan -- to help stand up local forces that can take over from coalition forces and provide for their own security in each nation. Bowen focused on the Iraq program in the new report.
"Lack of controls" and "serious contract management issues" at the INL bureau made it "vulnerable to waste and fraud," Bowen said.
Generations from now, they're really gonna wonder just how stupid we could be...sigh.
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