On Monday, Bush signed the 2008 Defense authorization bill into law. In it he singled out four of 2,887 sections for his now notorious signing statement. He said that these four provisions "purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as commander in chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

What where these egregious provisions that could tie the commander-in-chief's hands and threaten our national security? They all had to do with oversight. According to the Congressional Quarterly:

One such provision sets up a commission to probe contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another expands protections for whistleblowers who work for government contractors. A third requires that U.S. intelligence agencies promptly respond to congressional requests for documents. And a fourth bars funding for permanent bases in Iraq and for any action that exercises U.S. control over Iraq's oil money.

I will leave it to others to discuss the provision about barring funding for permanent bases. As some of my readers know, the Freshman Democratic Senators, lead by Senators Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb, pushed through a Wartime Contracting Commission, patterned after the old Truman Committee that was so successful at exposing World War II contactor fraud while the war was still going on. The old Truman committee was reported to save $15 billion (1943 dollars) in taxpayer dollars.

I know that there have been dozens of commissions looking at the DOD for years and all to show from it was reports gathering dust in the archives. But these Freshman Senators were determined to set this up to actually investigate contracting fraud and send referrals to the Department of Justice for prosecution even as the war continued. This commission will also look at ways to stop the hemorrhaging of contractor money. It is surreal that this president feels that he as to single this commission to ignore at his whim because he thinks it could threaten his ability to protect this country.

Another provision that he included in the signing statement was a provision that gave more protection to contractor employees who want to expose fraud. In the course of researching my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, I interviewed dozens of contractor employees in Iraq. Most of them were too afraid to go public but were outraged at what their employers were doing in Iraq, especially to the detriment of the troops.

But Webb, the Jedi Knight of the Freshman Democratic Senators, stormed to the Senate floor and declared his defiance to this signing statement.

"...the President of the United States--who has been in charge of the conduct of this war and whose administration has been in charge of executing these contracts, supervising them, making sure that they meet the requirements of fairness in the law--is now saying that he believes that a legislative body can enact a law that he can choose to ignore because he says it would interfere with his responsibility to supervise a war as Commander-and-Chief.

I am at a total loss here. I am amazed to see this kind of language employed with respect to this legislation.

The Commission was put into place with broad bipartisan and bicameral support, with the intention of studying systemic problems. I would think that these are the sorts of problems that this President would want to root out.

The Commission's historic precedent goes back to the Truman Committee of World War II. Then-Senator Harry Truman wanted to look at wartime waste, fraud, and abuse so that the American government could get a proper handle on the federal spending that was going into mobilization and the projects that were being put on the line. And we certainly didn't see President Franklin Roosevelt trying to say that the Truman Committee's work was going to interfere with his ability to conduct World War II...

...If the Administration would like to explain to us what their constitutional issue is with a piece of legislation that the President has just signed, we would be happy to hear that. In the meantime, we are moving forward with this Commission. It is vitally important to accountability in the government, and I'm very proud to have introduced it. We are marching forward."

Webb and Bush have tangled before about Iraq, even to the point of discussing Webb's son and his deployment to Iraq. Let's just hope that the Congress has the same moxie as Webb, inserts its constitutional rights and begins this commission soon. We need to get control of the contractor money and also get some of the ill gotten gains back. Otherwise, the war service industry contractors will have a permanent institutional hold on the US Treasury without oversight.

Dina Rasor

In response to Senator John McCain's flip comments of spending thousands of years in Iraq, President Bush gave the war service industry a big boost to their financial bottom line. He said that the US could "easily" spend ten more years in Iraq.

This is music to the war service industry's ears. And to add icing to the cake, DOD Secretary Gates is considering sending 3000 more troops into Afghanistan to blunt any spring offensive by the Taliban. Since the US Army has contracted out more vital logistics than any other war in history, the war service industry will continue to rake in the government's money as long as we stay in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There have been jabs at reform but most are on hold. The Democratic Senate Freshman have succeeded in passing some impressive reforms and a commission to look at the war service industry but these measures were in the 2008 defense authorization bill that Bush has vetoed (because of another provision) and it is unknown if these reforms will survive the next round. In fact, Blackwater and other war service industry companies have ramped up their lobbying effort in DC and this does not bode well for reform.

The Army attempted, under pressure from the Congress and the media, to change the mother of all logistics contracts, the LOGCAP III contract with KBR, which is billing at least a half a billion a month to the government. The Army broke the contract out to three contractors, KBR being one, and had a contractor to oversee the other contractors. Although this LOGCAP IV contract was only marginally better for the US government, contractors who lost won an appeal to put the contract on hold. So the extremely expensive and wasteful LOGCAP III contract continues to be in effect with KBR billing at a breathtaking rate. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity recently released a report that found that "U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006."

This growth occurred before and after the recent troop surge so the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't seem to matter. Time is on the contractors' side, the longer we are there, the more they can bill, regardless whether the work has actually increased.

With the likes of Senator Ted Stevens admitting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (apparently the new contractor growth area) are costing $15 billion a month, we may have found that the war service industry may be the best recession proof industry now in America. The longer they go unchecked and are allowed to infiltrate the Congress with lobbyists and lure experienced men out of our military, the harder they will be for the Congress to control. The cynics will invest in these companies to make money. Let's just hope that the reformers will get their reforms through and not fade in the face of the war service industry's increasingly powerful Washington presence. Every month in Iraq is putting a brutal crunch on our nation's money resources and the war service industry grows more powerful.

Dina Rasor

By now, many know the story of how the US lost track of around $9 billion in Iraqi assets and how corruption by US contractors and the Iraqi government has prevented much of the meaningful rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure. Now, according to a story in the New York Times, Pakistan has misused funds and inflated bills on the $10 billion that we have given them to assist in the war on terror. The Times article claims that the US supplies an amazing one quarter of the Pakistani military budget.

From the Times:

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

One's first reaction may be ho-hum because the government of Sadam and the current government of Pakistan have a history of corruption. I have had military people tell me that corruption is just the way that "those" societies work. But our country is the hypocrite on two levels: one, we lecture to them that a working democracy needs financial transparency to effectively win the confidence of the people and two, we have allowed our own DOD and State department private contractors to unmercifully rip off our government due to corruption and a woeful lack of oversight.

If we expect these governments in the Middle East to have a true working democracy, they have to overcome their old systems. We are pressuring them to reform but can we expect them to take anything we say seriously when they watch the fraud we allow in our own military system? Iraq and Pakistan must see the irony and dismiss our hollow lecturing about democracy.

Transparency International, a non-profit group that measures corruption around the world, ranked 180 countries around the world. Denmark ranked number one as the least corrupt. As would be expected, Iraq is near the bottom with a low ranking of 178 and Pakistan is ranked at 128. But the United States, which holds itself to being one of the most successful democracies in history, only makes a ranking of 20, behind Singapore and Hong Kong.

Senator Clinton and others say that they want to look into this and find out where the money went. It is a start but aren't we just trying to close the barn door after the horse has escaped? By investigating the claims now, the US will enrage and embarrass Pakistan and will further rock a very delicate diplomatic situation.

When will our government be serious about corruption in our military and our military aid and put in the safe guards that we need? The Congress has tried to pass some reforms (more on that in my next post) but until the US government has no tolerance of fraud and corruption in our system, we can't expect the world, especially countries experimenting with democracy, to take us seriously when it comes to transparency and accountability. We need to raise our Transparency International ranking in the world through serious reform, especially since even Senator Ted Stevens claims we are spending $15 billion a month on the war on terror. Which candidate will embrace this challenge?

Dina Rasor