The New York Times’ James Glanz goes through a gruesome Pentagon audit that finds payments to private contractors in Iraq going toward…well, we have no idea what they’re going toward. In a sample of 802 war-related Dept. of Defense contracts worth $8.2 billion, 95 percent don’t have proper legal documents. About 15 percent of the contracts lack even minimum documentation such as receipts, invoices, and the names of contract recipients.

In many instances money is simply transferred over to private companies, or countries in the coalition of the willing, with no language in the contract explaining what the money is going toward. The news here is not that the Pentagon can’t audit $8.2 billion. It’s that the Pentagon can’t audit 95 percent of a representative $8.2 billion sample. How much total Pentagon money has vanished into the Iraqi ether is anybody’s guess.  Read Glanz here.  MB

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