Bonus scene from Brave New Films’ Iraq For Sale.  This juxtaposition between what our troops are being paid and what contractors are raking in seemed awfully appropriate this morning.

Solai shared a link to a Rolling Stone article on war profiteering this morning that has my blood absolutely boiling.  To wit:

…A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that’s supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You’ve done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate,” they write, adding that “the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles” and that “during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member’s shirt.” The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fias­co, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill — after all, you’re a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.

You blink. Fuck if you know. “I have some conjecture, but that’s all it would be” is your deadpan answer.

The room twitters in amazement. It’s hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.

Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company’s compensation. Touchy subject — you’ve got a “cost-plus” contract, which means you’re guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make — and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you’ve got to cut him off. “So you won’t voluntarily look at this,” Van Hollen is mumbling, “and say, given what has happened in this project . . . “

“No, sir, I will not,” you snap.

“. . . ‘We will return the profits.’ . . .”

“No, sir, I will not,” you repeat.

Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president’s administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now ­assessed at $929,974, and you’re sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.

“Yeah, I don’t know what I expected him to say,” Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. “It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for everything.”

Jeebus. These people have no ethics, no morality, no commitment to doing quality work that keeps our nation’s soldiers safer — it’s all about greed and what’s in it for me. And that is all.  Remember when there might be just a little public shame in being exposed as a greedy fraud who cared not one whit for the fact that he was a failure?

The next Republican who starts wagging their finger in the “you are either with this President or you aren’t patriotic” tapdance is going to be scraping themselves off the wall when I get through tearing them a new one.  Read the whole damned thing.  And then consider this little factoid:  there are more contractors working in Iraq than there are soldiers.  That’s an awfully big bottom line, isn’t it?

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