Mr. Kelly, your article on the Healthcare centers in Iraq was very detailed and I can tell you did your homework. You seem to have received a great deal of knowledge on the construction of PHC's, however; you have only been told what some might want you to know, believe, or publish. Your figures are somewhat correct but you should have stopped while you were ahead (I will address that later). I would like to ask if you have any first-hand knowledge of what it takes to construct anything in Iraq. Are you aware of the corruption? Corruption in Iraq is by far the greatest obstruction to the reconstruction efforts; far greater than terrorism. When a company, such as the one you have mentioned in your article, is mandated by the client to use Iraqi companies and labor to assist in rebuilding the infrastructure that's where the problem starts. Yes, it only makes sense, but how many reputable construction companies do you know in Iraq with the necessary financial resources and ethical business practices to build a healthcare center in accordance with American standards. Please share that with me. Maybe it would be a good idea to have companies such as the one you have mentioned in your article send out Subcontractor questionnaires and maybe check the Iraqi financial institution’s records. Good luck, because the financial documents that you receive will be as fraudulent as the PHC Contracts that Iraqis were creating and selling to other Iraqis companies. Yes, Iraqis were posing as representatives of the company you mentioned in your article and forging contract documents. They would sell those contracts to other Iraqi construction companies assuring them they would be awarded a contract to construct one or more Healthcare centers. I think in the contracts were selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000.00 each. The host contractor had to entertain all of these fraudulent activities and report the findings to the client, thus consuming valuable time which equates to administrative overhead. Oh, this is not to mention that once a contract was awarded to a company believed to be a reputable construction firm it was very likely that they or one of their employees could sell the contract at a higher dollar value. The Sheikh, you know him; he’s the person that has his hand out as well. In order for a company to work in his territorial region you have to scratch his back, you know, grease his palm just to get admittance to his neighborhood. Once you’ve gained admittance now you have to gain acceptance of the locals by hiring the local citizens, most of who could not erect a Lego block building if they were given a blueprint. Forgive me, I meant a picture. So you start by hiring not the semi-experienced labor, but the people that have squatted on the land to prevent construction (I bet you never figured this into your quotation or bid response). This is called having your priorities straight. All the while your Iraqi subcontractor (you know the one that is financially well-off) is negotiating these deals; he’s not been compensated for his negotiation disbursements. And of course a reputable American construction firm can not agree to compensate the contractor for such type of negotiation agreements or tactics that were necessary to gain access to the site in order to start construction. It’s just not ethical. Besides, how would you justify price fair and reasonable to the USG? How do you manage this type of activity? I know, let’s take them to through the Iraqi court system. Mr. Kelly, I hope I’ve given you an idea of the types of corruption that were, and probably still are occurring in Iraq today. I could furnish you enough information to write a novel based on corruption alone.

Terrorism, yes it does exist in Iraq. Especially for those that support the US occupation and the US led reconstruction efforts. Iraqis are not supposed to know that the Healthcare centers are being constructed by the efforts of American companies. Let’s put up a sign to let everyone know that these centers are being constructed by the Ministry of Health (MOH). Oops, remember the fraudulent subcontracts, the circulation of those might give our little secret away. What about a disgruntled employee or someone looking to make a quick $75.00 to set an improvised explosive devices (IED). Ask Mr. USG what happened when they organized a grand opening of a completed Healthcare center all shiny and new ready to be turned over to the Ministry of Health. Yes, I’ve seen your pictures but I have some pictures to be really proud of. But any way, the Army cordoned off the streets, yellow ribbon lined the perimeter of the facility, MOH representatives were present along with top-ranking military officials. What a site to see! The following day, the USG was asking the American contractor how much it would cost to repair the damage from the improvised explosive devices (IED). That’s a center the contractor didn’t get credit for completing and not considered in my tabulation below.

Mr. Kelly, do you have pictures of IEDs found during the construction of the healthcare centers? Probably not, but when this happens the military and explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) have to be called in to clear the site prior to resuming work. Do you think they are in a hurry? This is doesn’t happen in a day. What happens when you ask a construction worker to wear a hardhat? You know; the construction worker that’s use to working barefoot or wearing sandals. Have you ever seen elevated scaffolding that’s comprised of 55 gallon barrels on each end with a 12’ 2”x6” used for support? This is a frequent and accepted work practice in Iraq. Do you think they’ve ever heard of elevated safety precautions? Work was directed to be stopped on numerous occasions due to safety and or quality violations. As for Iraqis these are socially accepted work practices. To an American firm it is cause for suspensions, fines, terminations, etc. to include to “Stop Work”, until all safety and quality violations have been corrected. Whether you choose to believe it or not, it directly impacts the administrative overhead. For some reason OSHA doesn’t have too much involvement with Iraqi employees. I tried to call the Iraqi labor union once but didn’t have too much success in finding the number.

I’m sure you’ve seen the land that was provided for construction especially in the southern region of Iraq. For the most part, the land was a nothing short of a lake. Other lots contained burial artifacts, trash dumps, existing structures that had to be removed, buried foundations, make-shift homemade electrical plants with no less than 1000 power lines strewn across the ground as a result of pirated electricity. Of course you might have seen this in the 4/29/06 SIGIR report referenced in your article or maybe your sources would have readily revealed this to you. In some instances site remediation to prepare the land for construction could easily amount to $150,000.00 per lot. One can clearly see the additional cost incurred for site remediation and any company would have been completely justified to request additional funding and time extensions to perform the remediation of these lots as the inadequate site conditions were unforeseeable; but did the USG acknowledge these activities in a timely manner? No. Ask your sources how far into the program did the negotiations take place for these activities. Who was responsible for funding the additional work up to the point of negotiations and still bears $9-10 million dollars of the cost incurred for costs that was not allowable?
I could go on all day for what might seem like excuses to a person that was not directly involved in the reconstruction efforts, but these justifications to the hindrances and unforeseen obstructions to the construction efforts are REAL!
Before closing, please allow me to comment on another point in your article that interested me. You mentioned that 8 healthcare centers were completed. It’s was more like 20 (trust me on this) so whip out that trusty TI calculator one more time.

If twenty-two percent of the original $186 million Parsons was contracted went towards security that means they paid $41 million for it. That leaves $145 million to build 142 health centers, of course that's less the 'administrative overhead'. The average amount of administrative costs for construction companies (see Yahoo! Finance) is about 10%, so Parsons would have been in the right taking $14.5 million for 'administrative expenses.

This is where you should have stopped while you were ahead. Let’s use your numbers, $145 million less your 10% for admin overhead leaves 130.5 to construct 142 healthcare centers. What does you trusty TI read now? Also, let’s not forget the centers that were not completed the construction of those had to be paid for as well, at least a percent of the completion. And according to the USG the percents of those completed out of 121 facilities (remember 20 were complete) that why they only assessed 121 and they are as follows:

% complete = healthcare centers

0-10 = 1 60-69 = 22
11-20 = none 70-79 = 18
21-29 = 4 80-89 = 10
30- 39 = 11 90-99 = 13
40-49 = 13
50- 59 = 29

Mr. Kelly, I have attempted to illustrate to you certain elements whereby administrative overhead can be consumed. It is far too easy for one to point out what appears to be failure without all the circumstances and facts. I would venture to say that at the rate the construction was starting to progress, the Healthcare center program given more time would have been 90% complete by now. This to me is a success by any measurement. The people involved in that program need not hang their heads as they did the best they could with the land they were given.

Here are some questions that I don’t seem to have the answers. I was wondering if you could assist. What was the average square meter price of the healthcare centers that were awarded by the contractor mentioned in your article? After the USG re-awarded the healthcare centers what was the price of the average square meter price of the semi completed centers? Ten months after the USG has been in receipt of the healthcare center program can you tell me how many healthcare centers have been completed? When answering the last question try not to take into consideration the 12 additional centers that were complete at the time of termination or the 13 that were in the 90 percentile range of completion.

Thanks for your time,

I was there

April 29, 2007
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling
By JAMES GLANZ

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

“These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid,” Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector general, said in an interview on Friday.

The conclusions will be summarized in the latest quarterly report by Mr. Bowen’s office on Monday. Individual reports on each of the projects were released on Thursday and Friday.

Mr. Bowen said that because he suspected that completed projects were not being maintained, he had ordered his inspectors to undertake a wider program of returning to examine projects that had been completed for at least six months, a phase known as sustainment.

Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue to function once they have been built.

The new reports provide some support for that position: a sophisticated system for distributing oxygen throughout the Erbil hospital had been ignored by medical staff members, who told inspectors that they distrusted the new equipment and had gone back to using tried-and-true oxygen tanks — which were stored unsafely throughout the building.

The Iraqis themselves appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which cropped up after the United States turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Mr. Bowen said.

Besides the airport, hospital and special forces barracks, places where inspectors found serious problems included two projects at a military base near Nasiriya and one at a military recruiting center in Hilla — both cities in the south — and a police station in Mosul, a northern city. A second police station in Mosul was found to be in good condition.

The dates when the projects were completed and deemed successful ranged from six months to almost a year and a half before the latest inspections. But those inspections found numerous instances of power generators that no longer operated; sewage systems that had clogged and overflowed, damaging sections of buildings; electrical systems that had been jury-rigged or stripped of components; floors that had buckled; concrete that had crumbled; and expensive equipment that was simply not in use.

Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

A case in point was the $5.2 million project undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build the special forces barracks in Baghdad. The project was completed in September 2005, but by the time inspectors visited last month, there were numerous problems caused by faulty plumbing throughout the buildings, and four large electrical generators, each costing $50,000, were no longer operating.

The problems with the generators were seemingly minor: missing batteries, a failure to maintain adequate oil levels in the engines, fuel lines that had been pilfered or broken. That kind of neglect is typical of rebuilding programs in developing countries when local nationals are not closely involved in planning efforts, said Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington.

“What ultimately makes any project sustainable is local ownership from the beginning in designing the project, establishing the priorities,” Mr. Barton said. “If you don’t have those elements it’s an extension of colonialism and generally it’s resented.”

Mr. Barton, who has closely monitored reconstruction efforts in Iraq and other countries, said the American rebuilding program had too often created that resentment by imposing projects on Iraqis or relying solely on the advice of a local tribal chief or some “self-appointed representative” of local Iraqis.

The new findings come after years of insistence by American officials in Baghdad that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and not enough to the successes.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps, told a news conference in Baghdad late last month that with so much coverage of violence in Iraq “what you don’t see are the successes in the reconstruction program, how reconstruction is making a difference in the lives of everyday Iraqi people.”

And those declared successes are heavily promoted by the United States government. A 2006 news release by the Army Corps, titled “Erbil Maternity and Pediatric Hospital — not just bricks and mortar!” praises both the new water purification system and the incinerator. The incinerator, the release said, would “keep medical waste from entering into the solid waste and water systems.”

But when Mr. Bowen’s office presented the Army Corps with the finding that neither system was working at the struggling hospital and recommended a training program so that Iraqis could properly operate the equipment, General Walsh tersely disagreed with the recommendation in a letter appended to the report, which also noted that the building had suffered damage because workers used excess amounts of water to clean the floors.

The bureau within the United States Embassy in Baghdad that oversees reconstruction in Iraq was even more dismissive, disagreeing with all four of the inspector general’s recommendations, including those suggesting that the United States should lend advice on disposing of the waste and maintaining the floors.

“Recommendations such as how much water to use in cleaning floors or disposal of medical waste could be deemed as an intrusion on, or attempt to micromanage operations of an Iraqi entity that we have no controlling interest over,” wrote William Lynch, acting director of the embassy bureau, called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.

posted under fair use and for discussion purposes only

Bush & Co. fires back at Iraq Inspector General
by smintheus
Wed May 02, 2007 at 07:13:44 PM PDT

Yesterday the Special Inspector General for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, released to Congress yet another damning report about the administration's failures in Iraq. Bowen's office, long a thorn in the side for Bush & Co., investigated 8 large reconstruction projects in Iraq that recently were declared successes. The study found that 7 of the 8 were not operating as designed any longer because of incompetence and looting. Skymutt has an overview of other SIGIR findings.

A very embarrassing story at the worst time, undercutting as it does the fantasy that Democrats don't appreciate the many successes achieved in Iraq.

Today, by a curious coincidence, news leaks out that Bowen is himself under investigation by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency.

more with lots of links at dkos

more background w/links from this diary from kos

FBI Probes Iraq IG on Misconduct Claims

Friday December 14, 2007 4:16 AM

By LARA JAKES JORDAN and LOLITA C. BALDOR

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI is investigating the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Justice Department officials said Thursday, following allegations of misconduct from former employees.

The investigation of Stuart Bowen involves possible electronic tampering, including alleged efforts by the inspector general to go through e-mails of employees in his office, said two officials close to the inquiry. It is being handled by the FBI's Washington field office, according to law enforcement officials, who like the first officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

According to one of the officials close to the investigation, the FBI is looking into several issues of possible fraud and abuse and has interviewed a number of former and current employees - some two or three times. A grand jury has been impaneled, and has issued subpoenas for documents.

The official said that in addition to the allegations involving Bowen accessing employee e-mails, the FBI is also looking into whether Bowen and his deputy, Ginger Cruz, may have inappropriately used taxpayer funds to pay their legal expenses associated with an administrative investigation that began in 2006.

In addition, the FBI probe may also review whether Bowen misled investigators about the cost of an expensive book project about the special inspector general's activities in Iraq, which is being put together by his office.

A spokeswoman for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said nobody in the office had been notified of any FBI investigation.

``I can neither confirm or deny the existence of any investigation. However, no SIGIR official has received notice that they are the subject or target of a criminal investigation,'' SIGIR spokeswoman Kristine Belisle said.

Belisle also released a copy of a memo written by Bowen that addressed some of the issues raised in the investigation. In the memo, he said the office paid for $32,700 of Cruz's legal fees and none of his own. He said that SIGIR's general counsel determined that some of her fees could be paid by the agency since the administrative review ``covered actions taken in her official capacity.''

Bowen also issued a broad defense of his office - from its budget and pay policies to employee turnover - and concluded that, ``I take seriously the requirement that SIGIR maintain the highest standards of integrity and transparency as we carry out our demanding oversight effort.''

Congress Daily, a publication that focuses on Capitol Hill, first reported the FBI's investigation into the matter on its Web site Thursday.

Bowen denied any wrongdoing and also said he hadn't been notified by the FBI that he was a target, according to the report.

``I am confident that this is going to amount to nothing,'' Bowen was quoted by Congress Daily.

In May, the White House confirmed that Bowen's office, whose revelations of waste and corruption in Iraq have repeatedly embarrassed the Bush administration, was being investigated by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency after complaints from former employees. The executive branch organization was created to investigate allegations of misconduct by inspectors general at federal agencies.

At the time, the White House rejected suggestions the integrity inquiry was an act of retribution against Bowen, with then-press secretary Tony Snow saying the council was ``an independent investigative organization'' that did not directly follow the White House's direction.

That investigation, triggered by a lengthy anonymous complaint filed by former staff members, focused on a number of fraud and abuse allegations, as well as descriptions of possible workplace violations, including sexual harassment. It included charges that Bowen's office overstated the amount of savings that it generated in order to justify a budget request and that money was wasted on the book project.

The council's administrative probe is still under way but has been overtaken by the criminal probe.

Good original post ... it opened my eyes on a number of issues. As the response poster brought up ... pictures of ways American taxpayer money is being used would certainly be helpful ... if we are to be so proud of what America is doing to 'save' the world ... lets see the pictures and the reports of the great success's!

... and then also explain why the schools and med centers at home suck so bad and are being closed or severely underfunded because of extreme price gouging with the fat cats getting fatter and fatter ... and you thought it was all the fault of the 'illegals' ...

I have plenty pictures of finished projects. Don't believe everything you read!