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October 24, 2007

On "socialism" and the benefits of free enterprise.

Ed Stein:

The Bush administration, of course, has been doing everything it can to privatize functions that in any sane operation would be handled (or at least overseen) by the government. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's going really well so far.

From today's NY Times:

State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years

Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to private security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a year from $1 billion, administration officials said Tuesday, but they said that the department had added few new officials to oversee the contracts...

Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has so far gone unpunished...

In a report made public on Tuesday, a review panel found that there were too few American officials in Iraq to enforce the rules that apply to Blackwater and other security contractors. It also found that the conduct of the contractors had undermined the broader mission of ending the insurgency and establishing a democratic government in Iraq.

NY Times caption: A DynCorp worker, kneeling, trained policemen recently near Kabul, Afghanistan. DynCorp got 94 percent of $2.2 billion in police training and drug eradication contracts from a State Department bureau. (Fake dialogue by The Enchanted Porkfist.)

The ballooning budget for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend, contracting experts say...

The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened new opportunities in the burgeoning world of government security. Blackwater got a toehold with a $27 million no-bid contract to guard L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the American occupation in Baghdad. A year later, the State Department expanded that contract to $100 million. Blackwater now employs 845 of the more than 1,100 private security contractors at work in Iraq and holds a contract worth $1.2 billion...

Congressional investigators say the security bureau has sought to minimize episodes like the shootings of civilians.

“We are all better off getting this case — and any similar cases — behind us quickly,” one State Department security official in Iraq wrote to another, after Blackwater guards killed a father of six in Hilla in 2005, according to an internal State Department memo turned over to Congress. He recommended paying the man’s family $5,000.