Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
The New York Times has an article about a Pentagon contract given to a fly by night company run by a 22 year old (and his faithful VP, whose major credential is being a licensed massage therapist) to supply ammunition to our military and the Afghan military. The company provided aging, mostly useless ammunition purchased in Eastern Europe - and made hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
This follows on the heels of all sorts of similar nonsense in Iraq, like putting a 24 year old with no finance experience in charge of designing and opening the Iraqi stock market. Who's running this show, for crying out loud? Did they outsource government contracting to Billy Bob's Procurement Services and Bait Shop?
Comments
Lindsay Beyerstein at http://majikthise.typepad.com is providing some additional background on this, and the family connections that may have lead to this deal. Apparently his uncle owns an arms company that goes by the names of Botech Tactical and Kley Zion.
Check out the logos for the company on her website, then prepare for the flood of "OMG TEH JEEWWWSSS!11!". =/
Posted by: Left_wing_fox | March 30, 2008 10:10 AM
I believe the 24 year old was anti-abortion, which makes this a wise appointment in spite of his lack of experience.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 30, 2008 12:10 PM
Ahem... "Pro-life", please.
Posted by: konrad_arflane | March 30, 2008 12:51 PM
I reject the use of any rhetorical devices that creates a mischaracterization. If I could rewrite my original comment, I would modify that phrase to "anti-abortion rights" to be more accurate then the short-handed phrase I used.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 30, 2008 1:18 PM
"Did they outsource government contracting to Billy Bob's Procurement Services and Bait Shop?"
Interesting experiment #1:
Get a list of Bush and Cheney family business concerns and connections. List their relatives. Add to this list major campaign contributers and their families.
Compare this list with a list of who got contracts.
Would anyone care to place bets on where in this the un-named "22-year-old" fits in?
Half of getting such government contracts and profiting from them is hearing about them in time to apply for them. And knowing the byzantine and bass-ackwards paperwork and application process. Just about everyone who does it has to be walked through it the first time. This is how regular contractors want it. It is their turf so they want to keep the playing field and rules as murky as possible.
Odds are this kid has connections to existing defense contractors or was lead by the hand by one. A privilege extended only to VIPs or someone connected to a VIP.
So no. They didn't "outsource government contracting to Billy Bob's Procurement Services and Bait Shop". They outsourced it to the patronage system. Just like everything else.
Welcome to the GOP. Where connections and party loyalty trump economy and effectiveness. Keep this in mind when you hear about the steady stream of reports of waste, fraud and abuse coming out of this administration.
Posted by: Art | March 30, 2008 1:21 PM
Actually, I believe all he had to do is pass the "loyal Bushie" test (i.e. did you vote for him, and would you vote for him again) and he was in. That he might be anti-abortion was merely a bonus. (My sense is that most Republican elites wouldn't hesitate more than three seconds to have or pay for an abortion if the necessity arose).
Posted by: tacitus | March 30, 2008 4:38 PM
Art says, "Interesting experiment #1:
Get a list of Bush and Cheney family business concerns and connections. List their relatives. Add to this list major campaign contributers and their families.
Compare this list with a list of who got contracts."
Muckety.com has made a beginning on that experiment, but I think is so far light on political connections. This really needs to be done though if anyone is truly serious about weeding out government corruption. But is anyone really serious?
Posted by: Elizabeth | March 30, 2008 4:51 PM
Do you ever wonder if Baghdad Bob was meant as satire of the lies coming out of our administration and none of us got the joke?
Posted by: FutureMD | March 30, 2008 9:58 PM
Ed asked
Yup. And Billy Bob subcontracted it to Bette Lou's Beauty Saloon (sic).Posted by: RBH | March 31, 2008 3:51 AM
For those who haven't read it already, Blood Money by T. Christian Miller does a really good job of exposing just how utterly fucked up the private contracting system in Iraq became after the fall of Baghdad. It goes through a lot of the things Ed was hinting at in his post.
Posted by: Wes | March 31, 2008 7:46 AM
Heh. I miss that guy. Instead of Balko's idea of getting rid of the WH Press Secretary we should make it a Baghdad Bob type position. If they're going to lie to us the least they could do is entertain us while they're at it.
Posted by: SeanH | March 31, 2008 10:26 AM
Government contracts can only be written and signed by a warranted "Contracting Officer" as a contracting officer myself I can tell you one thing. We have a very very heavy workload especially in the "war zone" and this may be a shock we are human....and humans make mistakes. I dont know exactly what happened in this case but I can say this mistakes can happen and this looks like one.
Posted by: AFSGTSAM | April 1, 2008 10:48 AM
Come now, Sam - in effect, you're saying that the contracting regulations are written so poorly that a conscientious and honest contracting officer such as yourself is heavily overworked trying to meet the requirements - while STILL failing to protect the taxpayer from multi-million dollar errors and deliberate fraud. While I firmly believe you to be correct, that merely pushes the blame back a level or two, to the Contracting Agencies of the military services and DoD, which write those regulations; and/or to Congress which makes the laws that control those regulations. (And, of course, to that percentage of Contracting Officers who are less than conscientious or less than honest.)
Until we put some real teeth into the penalty clauses of these contracts, we'll continue to see fraud, waste, and abuse. As it is, in some cases it seems to be cheaper for the government to simply rebid a contract, writing off whatever was lost in the first one, rather than try to force compliance or recover damages.
Posted by: BobApril | April 1, 2008 11:46 AM