War & Disaster Profiteering

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents. Read More

Court documents and interviews with whistleblowers shed light on persistent problems in the operations of private military and security company MVM, Inc., a top provider of secret security to U.S. intelligence agencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read More

The senator, Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said at a hearing that Maj. Gen. Jerome Johnson, who was commander of the Army Sustainment Command until last year, made inaccurate statements to the Senate Armed Services Committee about problems with water supplied to American soldiers in Iraq by KBR, the largest defense contractor in Iraq. Read More

The Bush administration has disclosed that U.S. advisors in Iraq played a key role in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies. The no-bid contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil companies. Read More

The US has accepted that foreign contractors in Iraq will no longer have immunity from Iraqi law under a new security agreement now under negotiation, says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari. Read More

Efforts by defense contractor KBR to repair hurricane-damaged Navy facilities were deemed shoddy and substandard, and one technical adviser alleged that the federal government "certainly paid twice" for many KBR projects because of "design and workmanship deficiencies," the Pentagon's inspector general reported in an audit released yesterday. Read More

The Army official who managed the Pentagon's largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops. Read More

Tim Shorrock, a veteran investigative journalist and a longtime subscriber to the Dirt Diggers Digest, has just come out with a book called Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Shorrock describes how an activity that used to be handled by spooks on the federal payroll has been steadily transformed into a $50 billion Intelligence-Industrial Complex. Read More

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. Read More

Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. defense contractor, failed to follow military guidelines to track and manage costs on major weapons programs, according to an internal Pentagon document released yesterday by a government watchdog group. Read More