SOURCE: NYT

October 21, 2007
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By FRANK RICH
IT was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages.
Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the
second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air
Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban
Virginia garage.

Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance
in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that
the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research
Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for
official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a
decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I
really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The
question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors
in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr.
Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at
most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-
job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan
money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being
investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and
the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for
piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during
L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet
Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption
scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle.

Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the
very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq.
Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of
government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have
enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi
infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals. You can also see just
why the heretofore press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater
USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with
Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer.

Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability
in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in
Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr.
Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows
that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon
as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.

Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday. As
he told The Wall Street Journal last week, Blackwater no longer cares
much about its security business; it is expanding into a “full
spectrum” defense contractor offering a “one-stop shop” for
everything from remotely piloted blimps to armored trucks. The point
of his P.R. offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of
Pentagon loot.

Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only
about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job,
managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been
previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was
sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her
daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with
billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained
vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean
up the corruption.

Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun’s tenure is
even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general
delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically,
black holes: dozens of the report’s passages were redacted, as were
the names of many White House officials in the report’s e-mail
evidence on the Boeing machinations.

The inspector general also assured Congress that neither Donald
Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz knew anything about the crimes. Senators
on the Armed Services Committee were incredulous. John Warner, the
Virginia Republican, could not believe that the Pentagon’s top two
officials had no information about “the most significant defense
procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.”

But the inspector general who vouched for their ignorance, Joseph
Schmitz, was already heading for the exit when he delivered his
redacted report. His new job would be as the chief operating officer
of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company.

Much has been made of Erik Prince and his family’s six-digit
contributions to Republican candidates and lifelong connections to
religious-right power brokers like James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Mr.
Prince maintains that these contacts had nothing to do with
Blackwater’s growth from tiny start-up to billion-dollar federal
contractor in the Bush years. But far more revealing, though far less
noticed, is the pedigree of the Washington players on his payroll.

Blackwater’s lobbyist and sometime spokesman, for instance, is Paul
Behrends, who first represented the company as a partner in the now-
defunct Alexander Strategy Group. That firm, founded by a former Tom
DeLay chief of staff, proved ground zero in the Jack Abramoff
scandals. Alexander may be no more, but since then, in addition to
Blackwater, Mr. Behrends’s clients have includeda company called the
First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company, the builder of
the new American embassy in Iraq.

That Vatican-sized complex is the largest American embassy in the
world. Now running some $144 million over its $592 million budget and
months behind schedule, the project is notorious for its deficient,
unsafe construction, some of which has come under criminal
investigation. First Kuwaiti has also been accused of engaging in
human trafficking to supply the labor force. But the current Bush-
appointed State Department inspector general — guess what — has found
no evidence of any wrongdoing.

Both that inspector general, Howard Krongard, and First Kuwaiti are
now in the cross hairs of Henry Waxman’s House oversight committee.
Some of Mr. Krongard’s deputies have accused him of repeatedly
halting or impeding investigations in a variety of fraud cases.

Representative Waxman is also trying to overcome State Department
stonewalling to investigate corruption in the Iraqi government. In
perverse mimicry of his American patrons, Nuri al-Maliki’s office has
repeatedly tried to limit the scope of inquiries conducted by Iraq’s
own Commission on Public Integrity. The judge in charge of that
commission, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, has now sought asylum in America.
Thirty-one of his staff members and a dozen of their relatives have
been assassinated, sometimes after being tortured.

The Waxman investigations notwithstanding, the culture of corruption,
Iraq war division, remains firmly entrenched. Though some American
bribe-takers have been caught — including Gloria Davis, an Army major
who committed suicide in Kuwait after admitting her crimes last year
— we are asked to believe they are isolated incidents. The higher
reaches of the chain of command have been spared, much as they were
at Abu Ghraib.

Even a turnover in administrations doesn’t guarantee reform. J. Cofer
Black, the longtime C.I.A. hand who is now Blackwater’s vice
chairman, has signed on as a Mitt Romney adviser. Hillary Clinton’s
Karl Rove, Mark Penn, doubles as the chief executive of Burson-
Marsteller, the P.R. giant whose subsidiary helped prepare Mr. Prince
for his Congressional testimony. Mr. Penn said the Blackwater
association was “temporary.”

War profiteering happens even in “good” wars. Arthur Miller made his
name in 1947 with “All My Sons,” which ends with the suicide of a
corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost
21 pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has
been at the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-
building. As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James
B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date
“spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as
it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times
Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic
bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)

The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and
money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed
up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was
an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at
age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David
Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at
the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

Colonel Westhusing’s death was ruled a suicide, though some believe
he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to
T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the
case in his book “Blood Money.” Either way, the angry four-page
letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other
commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America’s
engagement in Iraq as a suicide note.

“I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse
and liars,” Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission.
“I am sullied.”