The $500 Screwdriver

Charlene Corley is the Pentagon's latest fall guy in the spending scandal that is the Iraq War. She is being fined $750,000 along with having her property seized and facing a maximum jail sentence of 20 years for each count of fraudulent billing. This particular scandal is the most egregious to reporters and Pentagon officials, as it involves the infamous act of mailing two washers to a U.S. military base for the grand price of $998,000. Remember the good old days of $500 screwdrivers? Remember the outrage? Does outrage even make sense any more, or is this amount of money just too much to consider seriously?

The Pentagon has so much money that it can set up automated billing accounts, to which contractors simply request the money. The Pentagon, the most bloated bureaucracy this world has ever known, has failed to protect the tax-payers money. Even that's not the full scandal though. I suspect it goes something a little more like this. The Pentagon, an organization modeled along bureaucratic models built to facilitate the interaction of several hierarchies, including the Air Force, Marines, and CIA, chose its budgeting system wisely. The same conflicts of interest plague the Pentagon as all of our other bureaucracies. Generals and Spooks in this "five-sided Fistagon" own stocks in the corporations they contract with. They have friends working as contractors and receive more private benefits (let your imagination run wild, 'friends with benefits') from the business of war.

This event that will be paid much attention to by the media, simply because the Pentagon has reported this theft of American tax-dollars. This isn't some crazed public watchdog group, mad for power and fame; this is the Pentagon. I suspect that as long as the Pentagon puts out press releases on this particular case, the longer the topic will stay in the media. This is a blatant attempt to scapegoat one extreme violator of our sensibilities, in order to draw the heat off the Pentagon for regularly paying way too much for screwdrivers and MREs delivered by their friendly contractors.

This is the dirty side of no-bid contracts that are given no oversight: $61 million for Halliburton, who overcharged for gasoline going to Iraq (apparently some Kuwaiti firm overcharged Haliburton for the gas, but does the private sector make mistakes on that order of magnitude?); KBR got gas from Turkey, 56 million gallons worth, at $1.18 and charged $2.27 to the Pentagon, that's close to $60 million on an over 100 percent mark-up; Senator Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee is looking forward to probes about Halliburton charging $60 billion for meals never served to troops; three army reserve officers and two civilians were indicted for funneling $8.6 million to a private firm in exchange for kickbacks and "other benefits". And finally, you may have heard the past moanings of media in feigned sympathy for the troops who often have to work alongside military contractors paid much, much more for being there. That is sad. Our troops are poor and languishing, at least the privates and petty officers, while these army rejects and rambos rack up, even enjoying extra legal protections from actions taken in Iraq.

We won't know until at least the Presidential election of '08 just how deep this rabbit hole goes, but it's fairly obvious to this observer that Charlene Corley with her $998,000 washers is just the smoke over the forest, the tip of the iceberg. Does she deserve to be fined and her misbegotten gains taken away? Sure, but she does NOT deserve a prison sentence for taking advantage of one of the numerous loopholes created for special use by the friends of the Pentagon. My dad told me to never tempt an honest man, and besides prison sentences should be reserved for the Pentagon decision-makers with obvious conflicts of interest. This would put a chill on the actions of war profiteers, at least until their human greed overwhelmed them again.