The Rag Blog: Why Has Corruption Been Such A Huge Part of the Iraq War?

22 December 2006

Why Has Corruption Been Such A Huge Part of the Iraq War?

The Builder Who Bombed in Iraq
Battered Over Failed Projects, Parsons's CEO Fires Back at Government Critics
By Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 22, 2006; Page D01

Until this year, Parsons Corp. was about as quiet as a $3 billion engineering and construction firm with 12,000 employees could be. That's the way the firm's chief executive for the past decade -- a soft-spoken, white-haired Army veteran named James F. McNulty -- liked it.

But Iraq has changed everything.

Parsons has been reproved in recent federal audits for completing just a small fraction of the 150 primary health clinics originally planned to be built in Iraq and for building a police academy so flawed that human waste rained from the ceilings. For this, it has taken bipartisan hits on Capitol Hill, where its name is now whispered by war critics in the same breath as that perennial boogeyman, Halliburton.

Sick of taking blame, McNulty, 64, is speaking out about what went wrong with his firm's work and what he regards as the problems with how the United States uses private contractors in Iraq.

Read it here.

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