Waxman: "Potentially Thousands of Criminal Cases Involving Fraudulent Contracts in Iraq"

A letter (pdf) from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Cali.) states that there may be "potentially thousands of criminal cases involving fraudulent contracts in Iraq."  Chairman Waxman's letter to Pentagon Inspector General Claude Kicklighter is based on an audit by the DoD IG that found that 4% of 702 transactions examined in a sample worth $1.5 billion "appeared to involve criminal misuse of taxpayer funds."  Waxman's staff extrapolated this to the entire pool of 180,000 transactions.  Thus, "there may be more than 7,000 potential criminal cases involving more than $190 million in federal spending that have not been identified." He added, "This is an astounding amount of potential criminal fraud."

Waxman requests that the DoD IG spend further resources and dig in to find and prosecute the full extent of the actual fraud.  However, unless the DoD IG, Army Criminal Investigation Command and others are fully staffed and empowered to pursue procurement fraud, Waxman's request may be impossible to fully achieve.

-- Nick Schwellenbach

Comments

[Posted on: Jun 21, 2008 at 03:33 PM]

The fraud alone is going to be so big that they are going to be forced to create Commissions of Truth and Reconciliation. Folks, what happened in Iraq is so endemic that it is going to take legions of U.S. attorneys to get to the bottom of it. People will be called to testify and if they tell the truth about their crimes the government is only going to take their money. If they lie they go to jail.

For the lies leading to the war the only option is to put people behind bars. My main targets if I were in charge: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfield, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perl, and many others. Even if the prosecutions fail I want these people shitting in their pants for the next four or five years.

[Posted on: Jun 17, 2008 at 03:52 AM]

Go get 'em, Hank!!!