CAIRO,
March 28, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The US administration’s lenient
line with fraudulent American contractors in Iraq would turn the
occupied country into a “free-fraud zone,” leaving the money of US
taxpayers at stake, NEWSWEEK revealed in its April 4 edition.
The
administration has not derived a lesson from the Halliburton scandal
as another contractor company, Custer Battles, has overcharged US
occupation authorities by millions of dollars, according to the
magazine.
“The
government has not lifted a finger to get back the $50 million Custer
Battles defrauded it of,” says Alan Grayson, a lawyer for two
whistleblowers Pete Baldwin and Robert Isakson.
The
pair sued the “nightmare” contractor on behalf of the US
government under a US law intended to punish war profiteering.
Several
Custer Battles “reconstruction” contracts refer to the other party
as “the United States of America”.
T.
S. Ellis III of the US District Court in Virginia has twice invited
the Justice Department to join the lawsuit but received no response.
Biggest
Corruption Scandal
The
administration’s legal stance will open the door to much more fraud
in the future, the mass-circulation weekly warned.
“If
urgent steps are not taken, Iraq ... will become the biggest
corruption scandal in history,” warned the anti-corruption group
Transparency International in a recent report seen by NEWSWEEK.
Lawyers
for the whistleblowers point out that President George W. Bush signed
a 2003 law authorizing $18.7 billion to go to US occupation
authorities in Iraq “as an entity of the United States
government.”
Franklin
Willis, a former senior adviser to the occupation government, known as
the Coalition Provisional Authority, said Washington’s apathy has
turned the Iraq occupation into a “free-fraud zone”.
