As someone who is concerned about government accountability, I admire exceedingly Alan Grayson, now running for our 8th District here in Florida (see here and here).
He’s an attorney (see the Vanity Fair article about him here) who has aggressively and relentlessly pursued corrupt defense contractors/war profiteers in Iraq. Matt Stoller, who met and interviewed him, writes:
Because of his track record suing defense contractors, Grayson is completely uninterested and unintimidated by ridiculous arguments about secrecy and national security. He thinks that war crimes have been committed, that people need to be put in prison, and that we absolutely cannot let bygones be bygones with the 2000-2008 era. He’s also running a good campaign with one of the best commercials I’ve ever seen., and doing it without any help from the DC establishment.
Stoller is a progressive Dem, but it’s not only progressives who should want to hold government officials and contractors accountable for fraudulent dealing or incompetence.
As Stoller says, we need a new type of Congressional representative. Grayson represents a position that should be of equal interest to people from both parties.
Fiscal conservatives who worry about their tax dollars should support Grayson as well. He has made a career of pursuing those awarded lucrative government contracts who have defrauded taxpayers by not giving them value for money in order to hold them accountable.
As he points out, the money we have thrown away on war profiteers could go a long way on the domestic front (and without raising your taxes).
The same should be true for those who care about the ways in which war profiteers have injured the troops.
The same should be true for Republicans who believe that public officials who break the law should be held accountable in the same way as us ordinary citizens.
Here’s Grayson’s excellent ad:
Here’s Stoller’s interview.
Here’s his campaign website.
Here’s his campaign website.Here’s a list of recent information about war profiteering in Iraq: The list is growing all the time.
This letter from Henry Waxman’s Oversight Committee to Robert Gates about the horrific injuries to troops and the insane number of fires resulting from shoddy electrical work at a base in Iraq.
This story about Halliburton’s inability to justify $1 billion that it spent on ‘noncredible costs.’
The BBC’s report that $23 billion dollars ‘may have
been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.’ Now that’s a lot of tax dollars. Waxman said: ‘
“It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history.” Sadly, the BBC can’t give us full details, being under a gag order that applies to 70 cases.This story about the Pentagon’s award of an $80 million contract to supply jet fuel to a company owned by a fugitive who has been indicted by the Justice Department.
This account of the outcome of ‘an internal audit of some $8 billion paid to U.S. and Iraqi contractors [which] found that nearly every transaction failed to comply with federal laws or regulations aimed at preventing fraud, in some cases lacking even basic invoices explaining how the money was spent.
This story about electrocution of troops in Iraq allegedly resulting from shoddy wiring by KBR. (BN-Politics)
This story of the munitions supplier (headed by a 22 year old man) which received $300 million for arms to be applied to Afghanistan’s army and police forces and in return provided ‘ammunition from the stockpile of the Communist bloc that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging,’ tens of millions of rifle and machine-gun cartridges that may have been illegally procured, and whose ‘president…was…secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania.’
This story about water site issues at three KBR sites in Iraq that allegedly caused troops to suffer skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses’ — because they don’t have enough stress in their lives already.
This story about a company which received $670 million in contracts for work which the Defense Department barely uses.
This story about a contractor who got $32 million for building barracks and offices which it then did not build.
This story about the State Dept’s and Pentagon’s disregard of numerous warnings they received about the risks of using security contractors in Iraq.
This story about the massacre of 16 Iraqi civilians by security contractors.
This story about KBR/Halliburton’s tax management strategy.
This story, explaining why it’s so easy for contractors to rip off the government.
And if that’s not enough, let me know. There’s more where those came from.
Cross posted at Buck Naked Politics, where I have included links to previous posts on defense contractor fraud and waste.
