In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners. It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.
“It’s a bit of a monument in the desert right now because it’s not going to be used as a prison,” said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office plans to release a report Monday detailing the litany of problems at the vacant detention center in Khan Bani Saad.
The pages also add another narrative to the wider probes into the billions lost so far on scrubbed or substandard projects in Iraq and one of the main contractors accused of failing to deliver, the Parsons construction group of Pasadena, Calif.
“This is $40 million invested in a project with very little return,” Bowen told The Associated Press in Washington. “A couple of buildings are useful. Other than that, it’s a failure.”
In the pecking order of corruption in Iraq, the dead-end prison project at Khan Bani Saad is nowhere near the biggest or most tangled.
Bowen estimated up to 20 percent “waste” — or more than $4 billion — from the $21 billion spent so far in the U.S.-bankrolled Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. It’s just one piece of a recovery effort that swelled beyond $112 billion in U.S., Iraqi and international contributions.
Conservatives get furious if some Americans game the system and take advantage of social programs. Where’s the outrage for wasting up to $4 billion on useless projects in Iraq?
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.
In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.
“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
It is the first time he has backed the withdrawal timetable put forward by Obama, who is visiting Afghanistan and us set to go to Iraq as part of a tour of Europe and the Middle East.
Obama has called for a shift away from a “single-minded” focus on Iraq and wants to pull out troops within 16 months, instead adding U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan.
Asked if he supported Obama’s ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.
“Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.”
From a purely political point of view, this helps Obama by giving legitimacy to his plans. Bush and McCain have always said that we would leave if the Iraqis asked them to stay.
It also isn’t a surprise. Malaki has been hinting at this for years, and he’s repeated it often in the last month. The Bush administration tried to negotiate long-term bases, but it’s becoming clearer that the Iraqis have different ideas.
As for what’s best for Iraq, nobody knows. Malaki is certainly trying to consolidate power, and by calling for a withdrawel be blunts some of the criticism coming from Sadr.
It’s certainly a positive development from the American point of view. We cannot maintain our presence there. It’s killing our economy, and it’s hurting the efforts in Afghanistan.
McCain has been saying since last year that he was against sending more US troops to Afghanistan, while Barack Obama was arguing we needed more troops there. His campaign was repeating that policy as recently as last week, but now he’s changed his position and is calling for more troops, mimicking the Obama policy. He even moved up his foreign policy speech by two days in an effort to trump Obama’s speech today.
The press is starting to pick up on this, and it will reinforce Obama’s point that Afghanistan and Al Qaeda need to be the focus of our counter-terrorism efforts.
This is a great move, and as Jacob Heilbrunn explains, it’s a blow to McCain. Hagel is a veteran as well and aa Republican Senator who opposes the Bush administration policy in Iraq.
I’m curious to see who else joins Obama as it might signal potential VP picks. Biden seems like an obvious choice for the trip regardless of whether Obama is seriously considering him for the trip, but if Evan Bayh joins them, it increases the odds that he’s the pick.
Many in the media have been critical of Barack Obama, suggesting that he wasn’t tough enough to battle the GOP in the fall. They cited his unwillingness to attack Hillary Clinton as an example.
Obama, however, did not want to alienate Hillary’s supporters. He got tough at times, but he often held back, knowing he would need her supporters in the fall.
With McCain, Obama is not holding back. He’s still running a generally positive campaign, but he’s showing he’s more than willing to go toe-to-toe with McCain on foreign policy and other isuues.
The latest scuffles involves McCain’s mistatement shere he claimed that our troops in Iraq were down to pre-surge levels. That was incorrect. Troop levels are 20,000 above pre-surge levels. McCain, however, would not acknowledge that he mispoke.
We all misspeak sometimes. I’ve done it myself. So on such a basic, factual error, you’d think that Senator McCain would just admit that he made a mistake and move on. But he couldn’t do that. Instead, he dug in. And the disturbing thing is that we’ve seen this movie before — a leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain refused to admit that he made a mistake. And that’s exactly the kind of leadership that we’ve had through more than five years of fighting a war that should’ve never been authorized, and should’ve never been waged.
We don’t need more leaders who can’t admit they’ve made a mistake, even when it’s about something as fundamental as how many young Americans are serving in harm’s way.
This is great stuff. McCain was gaining traction with the issue of Obama’s visits to Iraq, but then he makes a fundamental mistatement about troop levels and is unwilling to correct himself. And then Obama hammers him. Get ready for more of the same.
This guy looked like such a fool when he was press secretary, mostly because he was such a terrible liar. His attempts to avoid answering questions were pathetic. Now we know why. Basically, the man has a brain and a soul.
With his new book, he comes clean and tells the truth about the Bush White House. Some former colleagues have criticized him for not speaking up back then. His response was very credible – at the time he gave Bush and his team the benefit of the doubt. Now he knows they were not telling the truth. Here’s McClellan on the Today show.
Peggy Noonan blasts today’s pathetic Republican Party. She’s not saying anything new. She just has a way with words, and her essay sums up the problems nicely.
These problems, however, have been apparent for years, and even Peggy has been late to the party. In Kansas in 2006, old Republicans bolted from the party and won seats as Democrats.
The Republicans deserve to get crushed in the fall. If that happens, it will be the best possible result for the party (and the country).
I’ve had MSNBC on all day and I’ve heard virtually nothing about the situation in Iraq, despite the developing story regarding the increase in violence and the battles in Basra.
Of course, they’ve given plenty of air time to Barack Obama’s bowling score and the Monica Lewinsky questions lobbed at Chelsea Clinton.
