Bush administration: A Den of Theft, Graft, Cronyism, High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Effort to Speed Defense Contracts Wasted Millions

By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Scott HighamWashington Post Staff WritersMonday, December 25, 2006; A01


The Defense Department paid two procurement operations at the Department of the Interior to arrange for Pentagon purchases totaling $1.7 billion that resulted in excessive fees and tens of millions of dollars in waste, documents show.

Defense turned to Interior, which manages federal lands and resources, in an effort to speed up its contracting. Interior is one of several government agencies allowed to manage contracts for other agencies in exchange for a fee.

But the arrangement between Interior and Defense "routinely violated rules designed to protect U.S. Government interests," according to draft audit documents obtained by The Washington Post.

More than half of the contracts examined were awarded without competition or without checks to determine that the prices were reasonable, according to the audits by the inspectors general for Defense (DOD) and Interior (DOI). Ninety-two percent of the work reviewed was awarded without verifying that the contractors' cost estimates were accurate; 96 percent was inadequately monitored.

In one instance, Interior officials bought armor to reinforce Army vehicles from a software maker. In another, Interior bought furniture for Defense from a company that apparently had not previously been in the furniture business. One contract worth $100 million, to lease office space for a top-secret intelligence unit in Northern Virginia, was awarded without competition. Defense auditors said that deal cost taxpayers millions more than necessary, and they have referred the matter for possible criminal investigation.

"These poor contracting practices have left DOD vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse and DOI vulnerable to sanctions and the loss of the public trust," the Interior auditors concluded in their report.

They examined 49 deals and concluded that 61 percent had evidence of "illegal contracts, ill advised contracts, and various failings of contract administration procedures."

The auditors' findings underscore the difficulties that have come with efforts over the past decade to streamline government by outsourcing work, simplifying contracting procedures and cutting back on the procurement workforce. Agencies such as Interior are allowed to handle contracts for other agencies under the theory that they can perform some services more efficiently. But in this case, auditors found that Interior did not follow through on oversight and collected $22.8 million in fees for work the Pentagon could have done itself.
Officials at Defense and Interior said they have been working to fix contracting problems cited in the audits.

"We are currently reviewing the findings of the DOD IG, and we have been meeting with representatives of the DOI regarding the specifics of the draft report," said Shay Assad, director of defense procurement and acquisition policy at the Pentagon. "It would be premature to comment specifically except to say that we understand DOI is actively taking actions to improve their contracting practices in response to a number of the draft findings."
Interior officials said they are adopting many of the auditors' recommendations and have made "giant strides." They said they are examining "specific contracts of concern" as well as reviewing the qualifications of their contracting officers and improving their training.

"We believe that many of your recommendations can help us further improve our internal controls related to the acquisition environment," R. Thomas Weimer, Interior's assistant secretary for policy, management and budget, wrote in a Nov. 30 response to his department's inspector general.

Unnamed contracting officials were quoted in the Defense audit as saying that they went to Interior to save time.

"We used DOI because they are able to expedite the contracting process," one Defense official said.

Another said that the Defense office "did not have enough contracting people to handle the requirements."

The Interior procurement operations were allowed to charge fees for managing contracts on behalf of other government agencies. One of the operations, GovWorks, is located in Herndon. The other is the Southwest Acquisition Branch of the National Business Center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., an Army base.

Defense paid Interior management fees of up to 4 percent for everything from pistol holsters to intelligence consultants to office leases. The Defense inspector general said the Pentagon could have saved $22.8 million by using the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).
The Interior inspector general said Defense "could have used these monies to purchase as many as 50,000 sets of body armor to protect our soldiers."

At the Southwest Acquisition Branch office in Arizona, the auditors concluded, $411 million worth of deals were struck without a fundamental step in government contracting: review and approval by properly trained and certified contracting officers.

The Defense auditors found that nearly half of the 49 contract files they reviewed failed to document that the prices "were fair and reasonable." Contracting officials relied upon e-mailed statements and cursory reviews from the Pentagon, rather than "documenting a detailed analysis of the contractor's proposal."

At Interior, there was little supervision of the work. The Defense inspector general "questioned the adequacy of government surveillance for 23 of the 24 contracts" -- or 96 percent of the total reviewed in one analysis.

Key documents were missing from contract files. "Lack of good documentation can create serious problems," the auditors noted. "If it is not documented, it never happened."
The findings prompted the inspector general's office to demand that the Pentagon stop using Interior's contracting shops.

The auditors singled out two contracting arrangements for particularly sharp criticism. In 2002, the Pentagon opened a new office called Counterintelligence Field Activity, known as CIFA, which supervises protection at Defense facilities against terror attacks.

When CIFA needed office space in Northern Virginia, Defense officials turned to Interior's GovWorks program instead of the GSA, which manages office space for the government, the audit said. GovWorks awarded a 10-year, no-bid deal worth $100 million to a private company based in Anchorage to acquire and manage the space, the auditors said.

The auditors said Defense officials violated regulations by not using the GSA for their office space.

"CIFA and DOI circumvented numerous laws in contracting for leased space," the auditors said. "By not following the proper procedures, they entered into a lease without the legal authority to do so."

Auditors found that the lease cost taxpayers up to $2.7 million more than it should have. Auditors also found that the deal violated procedures because it was not cleared by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In May, members of the Defense inspector general's office told senior CIFA staffers that they could be in violation of the law if they continued to make payments on the lease.
"Subsequently, we learned that CIFA had continued to make lease payments, totaling $2.9 million," the auditors wrote.

The auditors referred the matter for possible criminal investigation to the deputy inspector general for investigations.

Weimer, Interior's policy and budget chief, disputed the auditor's findings on the lease arrangement. In his written response, he argued that CIFA did not have to go through the GSA to obtain the office space. Weimer also said CIFA did not enter into an improper lease because the lease was between CIFA's contractor and the managers of the office building. Moreover, he said, the chief counsel for the Justice Department's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force advised CIFA that the arrangement was appropriate.

The other arrangement that received sharp criticism from the auditors involved the Open Market Corridor, an online buying program billed as a way to save tax money.
Built by a California company, the Open Market Corridor began as a research project for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. In 2002, management of the contract was handed to officials at Interior's Fort Huachuca operation. The California company, the Naval school and Interior all received a small percentage when the system was used to order goods and services.

Auditors found that select companies were favored, in violation of federal regulations. The contracting officer responsible for overseeing the online purchases "was unable to provide a list of either the customers or participating vendors who were using the system," the auditors said.

Sixteen vendors "appeared to be Government employees or firms that appeared to be affiliated with Government employees," another apparent violation of regulations and a possible violation of federal criminal statutes, auditors said.

One official who processed 1,616 "contract actions" worth nearly $135 million was a lecturer at the Naval school who did not have the authority to award government work.
Senior Interior officials were not even "aware that the system existed" or that it was processing tens of millions of dollars in deals each year without approval, the audit said.

In March, after auditors reported the abuses, officials at the Naval school took the system offline.

The auditors concluded that Defense should not continue to manage or use the Open Market Corridor "because of the serious legal and other problems we found.

They referred their findings to the deputy inspector general and the Navy Acquisition Integrity Office for further investigation.

Bush's Worst Lies of 2006

Helluva way to run a country, eh?

Now we have year end counts of the biggest presidential lies.

Any predictions of a crop for next year?

Eleanor Clift: Bush's Worst Lies of 2006 - Newsweek Capitol Letter - MSNBC.com:

Bush has shifted his rhetoric in deference to the grim and deteriorating reality on the ground in Iraq. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 25 if we are winning the war, Bush said, “Absolutely, we’re winning.” Offered the opportunity at his press conference to defend that statement, Bush has adopted a new formulation. He now says, “We’re not winning, but we’re not losing.” That sounds like the definition of a quagmire.

Exploitation of the war gained Republicans seats in ’02 and got Bush a second term in ’04, but it wasn’t enough in ’06. Karl Rove decided the best way for Republicans to retain control of the House and Senate was to embrace the war in Iraq and run against the Democrats as “Defeatocrats” and “Cut and Runners.” It might have worked, had not most Americans decided they did indeed want to cut and run. Not right away—the voters want an orderly exit—but they weren’t buying Bush’s big lie about the Democrats.

Bush campaigned this fall as though the Democrats were the real enemy, not the terrorists. “They [Democrats] think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we’re attacked again … If you don’t want your government listening in on terrorists, vote for the Democrats.” Now that the Democrats have won, watch Bush try to off-load blame for the failure in Iraq. If the Democrats won’t go along with whatever cockamamie scheme he comes up with, he can always accuse them of losing the war.

`Robust' finish hinges on Iraq

Which means there won't be any robust anything........

`Robust' finish hinges on Iraq Chicago Tribune:

"WASHINGTON -- While President Bush promises a 'robust' agenda for the final two years of his presidency, his ability to rally both public and legislative support in the new Democratic-controlled Congress will hinge on his success in charting a convincing new strategy for the war in Iraq.

Feds: Homeland Security project didn't protect privacy

Anyone shocked by this?

Millions of people's data is floating around out there in data bases all over the world. Don't be surprised if there is someone using your name in Nigeria and you wind up on a no travel list..

[print version] Feds: Homeland Security project didn't protect privacy CNET News.com:

A Department of Homeland Security program that linked details on millions of air travelers with profiles drawn from commercial databases was plagued by 'privacy missteps' that misled the public, a new government report concludes.

The Transportation Security Agency, operating under the auspices of Homeland Security, had publicly pledged two years ago--in official notices describing the Secure Flight program--that it 'will not receive' or have access to dossiers on American travelers compiled by a Beltway contractor.

That promise turned out to be untrue, according to a report published Friday by DHS' privacy office. The commercial data 'made its way directly to TSA, contrary to the express statements in the fall privacy notices about the Secure Flight program,' the report says.

The report, and a second one critiquing a government database called Matrix, was released on the last business day before Christmas, a tactic that federal agencies and publicly traded companies sometimes use to avoid drawing attention to critical findings. Neither report appears on the DHS.gov or TSA.gov home pages, or even on the home page of the DHS privacy office, but rather was linked to from a subpage on the DHS privacy site.

Bush is Leading us into Hell

BY W. PATRICK LANG and RAY MCGOVERN12/26/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- -

Robert Gates' report to the White House on his discussions in Iraq this past week is likely to provide the missing ingredient for the troop ''surge'' into Iraq favored by the ''decider'' team of Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush.When the understandable misgivings voiced by top U.S. military officials made it obvious that the surge cart had been put before the mission-objective horse, the president was forced to concede, as he did at his press conference on Wednesday, ``There's got to be a specific mission that can be accomplished with the addition of more troops, before I agree on that strategy.''The president had led off the press conference by heightening expectations for the Gates visit to Iraq, noting that ''Secretary Gates is going to be an important voice in the Iraq strategy review that's under way.'' No doubt Gates was given the job of hammering out a ''specific mission'' with U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders, and he is past master at sensing and delivering on his bosses' wishes.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's aides have given Western reporters an outline of what the ''specific mission'' may look like. It is likely to be cast as implementation of Maliki's ''new vision,'' under which U.S. troops would target primarily Sunni insurgents in outer Baghdad neighborhoods, while Iraqi forces would battle for control of inner Baghdad. A prescription for bloodbath, it has the advantage, from the White House perspective, of preventing the Iraqi capital from total disintegration until Bush and Cheney are out of office.Well before Tuesday, when Gates flew off to Iraq, it was clear that Cheney and Bush remained determined to stay the course (without using those words) for the next two years. And the president's Washington Post interview on Tuesday, as well has his press conference Wednesday strengthened that impression.

In his prepared statement for the Post, Bush cast the conflict in Iraq as an enduring ''ideological struggle,'' the context in which he disclosed that he is now ``inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops, the Army and Marines.''Inconsistent messageLest the Post reporters miss the point, the president added, ''I'm going to keep repeating this over and over again, that I believe we're in an ideological struggle . . . that our country will be dealing with for a long time.'' In the same interview, he described ''sectarian violence'' in Iraq as ``obviously the real problem we face.''At his press conference the next day, the president repeated the same dual, inconsistent message, which went unchallenged by the White House press corps. Pick your poison: Do you prefer ''sectarian violence'' as the real problem? Or is it ''ideological struggle?'' The White House seems to be depending on a credulous press and Christmas-party eggnog to get by on this.

Incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said last Sunday that he could ''go along'' with the widely predicted surge in U.S. troops in Iraq, but for only two or three months. Is it conceivable that Reid doesn't know that this is about the next two years -- not months?

Egged on by ''full-speed-ahead'' Cheney, Bush is determined that the war not be lost while he is president. And he is commander-in-chief. Events, however, are fast overtaking White House preferences and are moving toward denouement well before two more years are up.`Get with the program'Virtually everyone concedes that the war cannot be won militarily. And yet the so-called ''neoconservatives'' whom Bush has listened to in the past are arguing strongly for a surge in troop strength. A generation from now, our grandchildren will have difficulty writing history papers on the oxymoronic debate now raging on how to surge/withdraw our troops into/from the quagmire in Iraq.

The generals in Iraq may have already been ordered by the White House to ''get with the program'' on surging. Just as they ''never asked for more troops'' at earlier stages of the war, they are likely to be instant devotees of a surge, once they smell the breezes from Washington. As for Gates, it is a safe bet that whatever personal input he may dare to offer will be dwarfed by Cheney's. Taking issue with ''deciders'' has never been Gates' strong suit.Whether Gates realizes it or not, the U.S. military is about to commit hara-kiri by ''surge.''

The generals should know that, once an ''all or nothing'' offensive like the ''surge'' apparently contemplated has begun, there is no turning back.It will be ''victory'' over the insurgents and the Shiite militias or palpable defeat, recognizable by all in Iraq and across the world. Any conceivable ''surge'' would not turn the tide -- would not even stem it. We saw that last summer when the dispatch of 7,000 U.S. troops to reinforce Baghdad brought a fierce counter-surge -- the highest level of violence since the Pentagon began issuing quarterly reports in 2005.A major buildup would commit the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to decisive combat in which there would be no more strategic reserves to be sent to the front.

As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway pointed out Monday, ``If you commit your reserve for something other than a decisive win, or to stave off defeat, then you have essentially shot your bolt.''It will be a matter of win or die in the attempt. In that situation, everyone in uniform on the ground will commit every ounce of their being to ''victory,'' and few measures will be shrunk from.Analogies come to mind: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Dien Bien Phu, the Battle of Algiers.

It will be total war with the likelihood of all the excesses and mass casualties that come with total war. To force such a strategy on our armed forces would be nothing short of immoral, in view of predictable troop losses and the huge number of Iraqis who would meet violent injury and death. If adopted, the ''surge'' strategy will turn out to be something we will spend a generation living down.

Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., spoke for many of us on Sunday when George Stephanopoulos asked him to explain why Smith had said on the Senate floor that U.S. policy on Iraq may be ``criminal:''``You can use any adjective you want, George. But I have long believed in a military context, when you do the same thing over and over again, without a clear strategy for victory, at the expense of your young people in arms, that is dereliction. That is deeply immoral.''W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel, served with Special Forces in Vietnam, as a professor at West Point and as defense intelligence officer for the Middle East. Ray McGovern was also an Army infantry/intelligence officer before his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. Both are with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Shift in Congress Puts Health Care Back on the Table

Universal Health Care should be a national security imperative, in the age of bioterrorism.

Shift in Congress Puts Health Care Back on the Table - washingtonpost.com:

Health care is set to return to the national political stage in 2007, setting up partisan clashes in Congress that could end with rare vetoes from President Bush and help to define the 2008 presidential campaigns.

After years in which Iraq and national security dominated the debate -- and memories of the 1994 Clinton health plan debacle made major health-care changes politically radioactive -- the return of Democratic control in the House and Senate and the ramping up of the presidential campaigns are expected to bring health policy back into the legislative mix.

Probes of Bush policies in works

It's about time!

Probes of Bush policies in works - The Boston Globe:

Mass. lawmakers to launch hearings
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff December 23, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Massachusetts lawmakers are set to launch a blizzard of investigations in the new Congress, probing issues such as wartime contracting, post-Katrina housing assistance, and the Bush administration's relationship with Cuba and other countries in Latin America.

The Unfriendly U.S.

Overseas visitors don't want to come here anymore. Government turns to the Mouse for help.

I know that Rod Sterling's ghost is here, somewhere.

U.S. looks to Disney for welcome for visitors In Depth Reuters.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Faced with a decline in the number of overseas visitors and unpopular entry requirements, the U.S. government is turning to the Walt Disney Co. and other theme park operators to brighten the country's battered image.

With security much tightened since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the visa and entry processes are so unpopular that the country was ranked as the world's most unfriendly to visitors in a survey last month of travelers from 16 nations.

Last January, the government promised to work with the private sector to create a more welcoming environment without compromising security.

Keeping Iraq attack numbers under wraps

When the numbers don't look good, hide them.......

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Keeping Iraq attack numbers under wraps: (See graph and rest of article)

A close look at the chart, however, notes that a few details are missing — specifically, the number of attacks in September, October, and November of this year, despite the fact that the report having been produced in December.

So, where are those numbers? Rood called Joseph Christoff, the GAO official who produced the document, who said he had all of the data, but had to leave the report incomplete because the Pentagon classified the numbers.

The number of attacks from August 2006, and every month prior, are publicly available, but the fall of 2006 has to remain classified? Without explanation?

Of course, this does fit nicely into the Bush administration’s m.o. — when data is inconvenient, hide it.