I'm sure everyone has read about this by now, but every once in a while
I just speak up to add to the resonance in the echo chamber.
If this is confirmed, it would be a flagrant illegal act by a
government agency:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/world/middleeast/30reconstruct.html?ex=1311912000&en=7e5f4de85760ef19&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">Audit
Finds U.S. Hid Cost of Iraq Projects
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: July 30, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 — The State Department agency in
charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an
accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects
there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from
Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.
The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or
administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that
reports to Congress and the Pentagon...
...The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By
April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of
escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would
actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to
Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital
project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in
his report.
Lying to Congress is illegal.
This is what a culture of corruption will get you.
Things like this usually are released "late Friday." I've
often thought that newspapers should have a little box on the front
page of the Sunday paper, that lists all the news items pertaining to
the federal government, that were released "late Friday."
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But that would be admitting how easily their own processes could be manipulated and that the "news cycle" was partly a construct of staff wanting a normal Monday through Friday life.
Sounds like something you should put on your blog...
But reactive you see. I've been reading you, too. Several comments had the plugged pulled mid-soak. Unable to take on anything new, then do something like Daily Transcript! A couple of your repostings severely tempted me. We see things very similarly, except for how to proceed. I demanded elsewhere -- my life.