The scandal and controversy surrounding World Bank President and prominent “neocon” Paul Wolfowitz continues to blossom:
The U.S. Defense Department ordered a contractor to hire a World Bank employee and girlfriend of then-Pentagon No. 2 Paul Wolfowitz in 2003 for work related to Iraq, the contractor said on Tuesday.
A spokeswoman for Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, said the Defense Department’s policy office directed the company to enter a subcontract with Shaha Riza, under which she spent a month studying ways to form a government in Iraq.
Wolfowitz, a key Iraq war architect who left the Pentagon in 2005 to become president of the World Bank, is already under fire for overseeing a high-paying promotion for Riza after he took the helm of the poverty-fighting global lender.
Senior Democratic congressmen and other critics have pressed demands for his resignation, saying his actions have undermined the campaign against corruption in the developing world that has been a hallmark of his World Bank tenure.
SAIC said Riza’s subcontract lasted from April 25 to May 31, 2003. She was paid expenses but no salary during her trip to Iraq, at her request, according to the contractor.
Melissa Koskovich, a spokeswoman for SAIC, said the contractor “had no role in the selection of the personnel who comprised the Iraq Governance Group under this contract.”
Defense sources said the Pentagon was reviewing the matter.
Usually these kinds of scandals have a momentum. And Wolfowitz is losing Big Mo. On the other hand, the Boston Globe’s H.D.S. Greenway thinks the problem with Wolfowitz is that he’s too much of an idealist.
Stephen Colbert has named Wolfowitz Alpha Dog Of The Week.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.