US occupation of Iraq: An ongoing criminal enterprise


by Bill Van Auken
Global Research, February 18, 2009
wsws.org


Recent media reports on the mounting evidence of wholesale corruption in US reconstruction efforts in Iraq are symptomatic of the criminal nature of Washington’s war and occupation from their inception nearly six years ago. These crimes are continuing under the Obama administration, with no end in sight.

Citing unnamed senior government officials and court documents, the New York Times reported Sunday that federal investigators have turned their sights on two senior US military officers who were in charge of contracting out reconstruction projects in Iraq in the aftermath of the March 2003 invasion.

Those named as subjects of the probe are Col. Anthony B. Bell, now retired from the Army, who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who functioned as a top contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004.

According to the Times, information about multimillion-dollar payoffs and bribes involving the office where the two men worked was supplied by Dale Stoffel, an American arms dealer who was shot to death in Iraq in late 2004, shortly after becoming a key witness for US investigators.

Citing two senior federal officials, the newspaper reports that Stoffel “drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in ‘dead drops’ around the Green Zone.â€