State Department Loses $1.2 Billion - Private Contractor Shell Game?

The US State Department is starting to sound like a doddering old relative who constantly misplaces things and just can’t remember what happened to his keys. Seems they misplaced $1.2 billion of taxpayer’s money, give or take a few million. That’s what the two new reports released yesterday show.

A State Department review by its own auditors says the practices used in keeping track of money being spent with private contractors are shoddy at best. In fact the department has no records of what it received from one of its largest contractors, DynCorp for most of the $1.2 billion it was paid to train police officers in Iraq. Other contractors mentioned in the audit are the infamous Blackwater USA and Triple Canopy.

It’s starting to seem as though anything to do with private security contractors and Iraq is a recipe for making money disappear. With so much money missing and Bush asking for billions more for the war in Iraq, I have to wonder how much longer Congress will sit on its collective ass and do nothing? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the money is going. It’s going into the pockets of DynCorp, Blackwater USA and Triple Canopy. Private security contractors with little or no oversight and a license to not only kill in Iraq, but apparently perhaps to steal. It's the private sector shell game. Why use public funds to fund government agencies when someone else can do a shoddy job and make a profit?

And as the State Department officials near the end of their term under the Bush administration I suspect a few of them are either lining their pockets or lining up choice private sector jobs with offshore assets and bank accounts in Dubai for their retirement.

I lived in Mexico for a year back in the 1980’s. It was a time in Mexico when each administration that was in power left with the treasury at the end of their 6 year term. (Something Vicente Fox brought to an end!) I am beginning to think the Bush folks have used that corrupt government as a model. More importantly, they used the old Mexican economic model as well, very few super-rich and lots of peasants!