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Harry Reid slams Iraq rebuilding chaos
A senator and civilian contractors have accused the US administration of allowing Iraqi reconstruction to become as chaotic as the Wild West.
Which means that in a hundred years, Baghdad will look like Denver.
Senator Harry Reid made particular criticism of the government's former occupation administration in Iraq on Monday. And civilian witnesses claimed Washington had protected an American contractor accused of fraud and accusatons of US media censorship. "This is a scandal," said Reid, who heads the opposition Democrats in the US Senate. "We are close to 24 months into this conflict with Iraq, and the administration still can't seem to get it right," he said.

Reid spoke during hearings in Congress into the management of the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) multi-billion dollar reconstruction programme. In the hearings, civilians compared operations to the Wild West, saying bags full of cash were tossed freely about, at times like footballs. Franklin Willis, who supervised aviation for the CPA in late 2003, accused the organisation of "poor execution" and called it "naive." He said that millions of dollars stored in the basement of the CPA offices were casually distributed to favoured contractors with little accounting discipline. Another witness accused the government of hampering an investigation into alleged fraud US-based by Custer Battles, which had contracts worth as much as $100 million in Iraq for airport security and other jobs.
Posted by: Fred 2005-02-15
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=56492