War Profiteering: The Government Waste You Won't Hear About at OTBL.

Now here's the kind of wasteful government spending you won't here our
friends on the other side of the borderline complain about.

Billions doled out to "security" companies like Halliburton and
Custer Battle for
services they never delivered.




See 60Mins Report:


Our new friend CATO gets upset about the government forcing him to help Katrina
victims, but where's the outrage over this grotesgue waste of taxpayer funds?

CATO: "But why should the government put a gun to my head and tell me I should be helping people solely because they made a stupid decision to live in New Orleans? You cannot make such a justification. They are not my problem. "

A few selected quotes from the 60 Min. Report:


"The United States has spent more than a quarter of a trillion dollars during its three years in Iraq, and more than $50 billion of it has gone to private contractors hired to guard bases, drive trucks, feed and shelter the troops and rebuild the country."

"It is dangerous work, but much of the $50 billion, which is more than the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security, has been handed out to companies in Iraq with little or no oversight."

"Complaints about Custer Battles performance at the airport began almost immediately. Col. Richard Ballard, the top inspector general for the Army in Iraq, was assigned to see if the company was living up to its contract, such as it was."

"And the contract looked to me like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka," Ballard says. "Complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes, to be filled in later. They presented it the next day, and they got awarded a — about a $15 million contract."

"In a memo obtained by 60 Minutes, the airport's director of security wrote to the Coalition Authority: "Custer Battles has shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war profiteers. Other than that they are swell fellows."

"How did Custer Battles perform that contract?

"Absolutely abysmally. I mean, it was beyond a joke," says British Col. Philip Wilkinson.

Wilkinson was a colonel in the British Army and was assigned to the Coalition Authority’s Ministry of Finance and charged with providing security to convoys that traveled all over Iraq, loaded with $3 billion in cash. The trucks were supplied by Custer Battles."

"And you can imagine, open trucks with that sort of money on the back, was just a red hot target for not only terrorists, but criminals," Wilkinson says. "And, therefore, we needed trucks that were going to work. When those trucks were delivered to us, some of them were physically dragged into our compound."

"Wilkinson says some of the trucks "were towed into the camp."

And Custer Battle’s response?

"When questioned as to the serviceability of the trucks was, 'We were only told we had to deliver the trucks.' The contract doesn't say they had to work," Wilkinson says. "Which, I mean, when you're given that sort of answer, what can you do?"

How did they get away with it?

"Oh," says Wilkinson laughing, "I really don't know. I mean it was just a joke. The assumption that we had was that they had to have high political top cover to be able to get away with it. Because it was just outrageous: their failure to deliver that which they were contracted to do."