The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

New Details on Largest Single Iraq War Bribery Case Yet

The New York Times has a front page story that both humanizes an Army officer "accused of orchestrating the largest single bribery scheme against the military since the start of the Iraq war" and takes you through some of the instituti...

Have the Pentagon, State Department, and USAID Learned From Their Mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Dudley Moore: Do you feel you’ve learnt by your mistakes here? Peter Cook (as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling): I think I have, yes, and I think I can probably repeat them almost perfectly. ~British comedians Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, ...

Another kind of “black water” in Iraq

This morning the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) held a follow-up hearing regarding Halliburton subsidiary KBR’s failure to test and treat water provided to military installations throughout Iraq. This water was to be used for showeri...

Commission Concerned with Contingency Contracting

By Scott Amey Losses from waste, fraud, and abuse "run into the tens of billions" when it comes to federal contracting for contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new report by the Commission on Wartime Contr...

Image Conscious: Two Visualizations for a Saturday Morning

Recently, a few charts have been circulating around POGO which all of us find pretty interesting, so we thought we’d share them with our loyal blog readers. The first is a visual comparing the dollar values of some import...

From Amey to Zakheim: 7 Quotable Quotes on Wartime Contracting Commission's Final Report

By DANA LIEBELSON and BRYAN RAHIJA Yesterday, the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) held a press conference on Capitol Hill to present their final report. Here are some key quotes from the event, along with a statement from POGO's...

The QDR is a Joke

The following was written by Ronald G. Garant. As an individual who has participated at relatively high levels in prior Defense Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDR), I could not contain myself as I read Newt Gingrich’s defense of the most ...

WMD Commission encourages the protection of dissent

The State Department's small intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), has encouraged dissent for years. Compared to the other intelligence services, its intelligence has had a better track record of success. ...