The $40 million failure amidst the $1 trillion failure

Via the AP: Empty prison in Iraq a $40M 'failure'

Another story of fraud an waste in Iraq. This time Parsons, a California contractor, was awarded a $900 million dollar contract for 53 projects dealing with prisons, border posts, courts, police training centers and fire stations. If this were the US they would have needed to assign 50+ contract officers and specialists, they assigned 10. Of the 53 projects, 18 were completed. For their troubles Parsons has been paid $333 million so far. Half of that sum was for projects that were terminated or canceled, including the prison profiled here and in the Washington Post. The prison isn't even usable.

This of course is part of a larger story of waste in Iraq. The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, who should release a larger report today, estimated more than $4 billion of the $21 billion spent so far in the U.S.-bankrolled Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund was wasted. That's just in this one area, as much as $23 billion has been lost or stolen overall. And yet the White House stands in the way of stronger independent oversight and overhauling the contracting system, while the Pentagon pressures auditors to favor the contractors.

On the whole, compared to Iraq as a whole, the loss of a few billion is probably one of the smaller unforgivables of this whole fiasco. But then it just shows you that this war was a clusterfuck from top to bottom. Every aspect is tainted, corrupted and executed poorly. They can't even keep an eye on $23 billion, how could we have expected them to run a war?