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Iraq for Sale
I'm just curious, have any Rantburgers heard about this movie? It seems to be causing quite a stir lately. I'm wondering what folks here think about it.Charles Lewis, the founder and executive director of the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity is one of the experts featured in the film. His team created the massive online resource Windfalls of War: U.S. Contractors in Afghanistan & Iraq. Here's what he had to say about war profiteering: Regardless of the war, the administration, or the various sophistries for expending human lives as a matter of government policy, profiteering from it universally offends all citizens, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, other parties or no shows. Most Americans, regardless of party or ideology, want to believe that any government of the people, by the people and for the people, as once put forth by Abraham Lincoln, necessarily must dispense the peoples business and money in a fair, honest and accessible way. As a developed democracy, for decades we have established extensive, government procurement processes to ostensibly ensure such full and open bidding for contracts. But of course the street reality is much worse. And unfortunately, despite political rhetoric and platitudes about competitive bidding, the indisputable fact is that in Iraq and Afghanistan and the entire, massive Defense budget, those companies winning the largest, most lucrative government contracts have been consistently among the most politically influential in Washington. They have expended millions of dollars to hire former Pentagon officials, to finance federal campaigns, to lobby the legislative processes. We are supposed to believe it is merely coincidental that the recidivist recipients of U.S. contracts, some of whom have committed fraud, price fixing or other abuses in the documented past, also just happen to be those who have most greased the skids in our nations capital. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington is the largest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the world, publisher of 15 books and roughly 300 investigative reports since 1990, its work receiving three dozen national journalism awards. The Center won the George Polk Award for its October, 2003 online report, Windfalls of War (updated several times since), which posted all Defense and State Department contracts awarded for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, first revealing that Halliburton had received the most lucrative contracts of any company. The Centers 2004 report, Outsourcing the Pentagon, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) award and profiled the 737 companies receiving at least $100 million in Defense contracts over a five-year period. No-bid contracts have accounted for more than 40 percent of Pentagon contracting since 1998, which amounts to some $362 billion in taxpayer money to companies without competitive bidding. This insider game will continue for the favored few as long as the public allows it, as long as Congress doesnt investigate it, as long as the national news media doesnt expose it. Only by discourse and illumination will the nation become engaged and enraged and awaken our various official or self-appointed watchdogs. Charles Lewis Founder, and for its first 15 years, the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity Posted by: eltoroverde 2006-10-14 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=168633 |