Dusty Can't Catch a Break

This is more of an update on the ongoing saga of bribery and hookers that swept Randy "Duke" Cunningham out of power and ensnared officials from the CIA in a sordid case of indiscretion and corruption, all of it linked to Brent Wilkes.Next time, perhaps these guys should call Paul Wolfowitz and ask him how it went for him when he lined up a great job for his gal pal:

[A] new indictment against Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, a former No. 3 official at the spy agency and a onetime senior CIA ethics officer, alleges that he pressured CIA managers into hiring the woman after she was turned down for a position in the CIA's general counsel office. He also allegedly made false statements about her qualifications, the indictment states.

Foggo, the CIA's executive director from 2004 to 2006, specifically told agency officials he had a "special interest" in seeing the woman hired, and he later berated them when they initially rejected her application. "When the ExDir has a special interest, you had better take notice," Foggo told the general counsel's staff, according to an indictment filed late Tuesday by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria.

Federal prosecutors say Foggo's alleged intervention on behalf of the woman was but one of a series of successful efforts by him to manipulate the intelligence agency, many of which went undetected for a time by its spies. Foggo managed to win jobs, money and other favors for friends and business partners while concealing the nature of his relationships from the agency, Justice Department officials allege in court documents.

Foggo, hired to the No. 3 position by then-CIA Director Porter Goss, faces charges of fraud, conspiracy and conflict of interest stemming mostly from alleged favors he performed for California businessman Brent R. Wilkes, a childhood friend and prominent GOP fundraiser.

You have to wonder if Foggo's girlfriend knew about the hookers:

In addition, federal law enforcement sources said the probe continues into "outstanding issues" in the Cunningham bribery case and that Foggo is part of those issues.

After reports surfaced last week alleging Wilkes provided Cunningham with limousines and prostitutes at two Washington hotels, Foggo said he had attended poker parties thrown by Wilkes there.

In a statement issued by the CIA, Foggo said he never saw anything "untoward" at the games, and he said any allegation to the contrary would be "false, outrageous and irresponsible."

"If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more," the spokeswoman said.

The FBI is investigating allegations that Wilkes contracted with a Virginia company, Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., to procure prostitutes for Cunningham and deliver them to the hotels.

Through his attorneys, Chris Baker, CEO of the company, denied wrongdoing.

Shirlington holds a $21.2 million contract to provide shuttle buses and other transportation for the Department of Homeland Security. Baker has a criminal record that includes two felony convictions and a number of misdemeanors.

And now you know why the "DC Madam" is dead. But you already knew that all of these things were connected, right?

Wilkes Doesn't Get Enough Time In Jail

The "Duke Stir"
Americans never pay attention to what matters. Corruption during wartime? Hey, that matters. People end up dead or maimed for life because of contracting fraud. It ain't sexy, but it's real. And it matters. It matters what gear the troops get and it matters how that money is spent.

Today, something that matters happened and I doubt you could find more than a handful of people who get the significance of it.

SAN DIEGO - A defense contractor was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison Tuesday for bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with cash, trips, the services of prostitutes and other gifts in exchange for nearly $90 million in Pentagon work.

Brent Wilkes was labeled "a predatory wolf (in) self-styled patriot's clothing" and a "poster boy for war profiteering" by prosecutor Phillip Halpern. U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said he was troubled that Wilkes continued to maintain his innocence.

"If you were to do the right thing about this, today is the day to own up," Burns told Wilkes at the sentencing hearing.

Well, of course, there's no way in hell Wilkes is ever going to own up to being a world class sleaze. Isn't there a war on? Wouldn't Wilkes qualify for the Death Penalty if somehow, somewhere, there was just an ounce of shame left in the US Justice system? Twelve years for a slam dunk case like this? What do you want to bet that a whole lot of prominent people wrote the judge nice letters about Wilkes?

This is what it was all about:

Prosecutors argued during a three-week trial that Wilkes lavished Cunningham with more than $700,000 in perks, including cash, submachine gun shooting lessons and the services of prostitutes. In return, they said, Cunningham helped Wilkes secure $87 million in Pentagon contracts, mainly for scanning paper documents.

Wilkes' attorney asked for a sentence less than the eight years and four months Cunningham received. Prosecutors asked for a "significantly higher punishment," and federal probation officials had recommended 60 years.

Wilkes acknowledged no wrongdoing in a brief statement in which he asked the judge to look beyond his dealings with Cunningham.

"I am a man who cares deeply for this community, for my family, for my country," Wilkes said.

Bullshit. Wilkes cared about that contract, and nothing else. This country was at war and he profited from it by bribing a Congressman. AND THAT DOESN'T GET YOU THE DEATH PENALTY IN THIS COUNTRY? I mean, what the hell?

This war has been a massive transfer of spending from social programs and entitlements to a defense contracting world that is stuffed full of contracts like the one Wilkes got Cunningham to send his way. Was he the lowest bidder? Probably not. Was it rigged? Obviously. So scanning paper documents probably isn't a sexy, glamorous contract. Not like, say, providing Marines with Mine Resistant Vehicles. Except that instead of money going to something that would save lives, here's a classic case of a bullshit contract eating up tens of millions of dollars that should have gone somewhere else. Isn't it weird to see Kit Bond actually doing something decent for once? Gotta take note of that.

Anyway, this contract also went into the Homeland Security realm, including a link to a limosine company. Nice to see how that money was pissed away, too.

This is what set me off tonight, though:

Authorities said Wilkes bribed Cunningham to win work for ADCS Inc., a data and document storage company he owned.

"Wilkes coldly and successfully exploited the simplemindedness of one of this country's war heroes, now a tortured shadow of his former self," prosecutors wrote in a pre-sentencing court filing last week. "Wilkes stands now revealed as a war profiteer, a thug, a bully, a lecherous old man who preyed on his young female staffers and hired prostitutes."

BULLSHIT! How loud can I scream it. Bull fucking shit.

Cunningham was not duped--Cunningham made a fucking list of what he wanted! He wrote it out on his office stationery! He knew exactly what he wanted, including spending time doing weird shit with women on the Duke Stir.

This went back years, for crying out loud. And Cunningham was always the bully in the room, NOT the one being bullied:

In the case of Cunningham, Stern remembers an incident he witnessed in 1996 between Duke and Congressman Barney Frank, the gay congressman from Massachusetts, embroiled at the time in his own scandal involving a former male companion who had been caught running a prostitution ring from the congressman's basement. The exchange happened at a meeting on immigration during which Republicans were maneuvering to prevent Democrats from commenting on a related bill. Frank objected to being steamrolled.

“When Barney started to make his plea, Cunningham cut him off and said, ‘Well, would you like to talk about prostitutes and basements,'” Stern remembered. “The room just fell silent.”

Yeah, so good riddance to you, Mr. Wilkes. May you rot in prison and then find a way to rot in hell as well.

Cunningham gets to rot with you...

Army Auditing Iraq Contracts for Fraud

A 105mm M1 Abrams tank, outside the
Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM)
Detroit Arsenal, Warren, MI

On Monday, ten specially trained auditors, criminal investigators and acquisitions experts will descend on the Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) north of Detroit to begin an audit of a sampling of approximately 6000 contracts worth $2.8 billion issued by an Army office in Kuwait that has been identified as a hotbed of corruption.

The office in question, located at Camp Arifjan, buys supplies and gear to support American G.I.'s as they rotate in and out of Iraq. Nearly two dozen Army, military and civilian employees have been charged with accepting bribes and kickbacks, and $15 million has changed hands. Depending on what the investigators discover, the number of individuals charged will likely grow. Currently the Army Criminal Investigations Command has 83 ongoing corruption investigations relating to contract fraud.

The highest profile corruption case to be charged so far involves Army Maj. John Cockerham, who stands accused of bribery, conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction. Prosecutors charge that Cockerham, in concert with his wife and sister, took at least $9.6 million in bribes in 2004 and 2005 during the time he was a contract officer in Kuwait.

Some of the red flags that have been raised include contracts awarded to vendors outside the usual competitive bidding process and contracts that went through the motions of the bidding process, then were awarded to the highest rather than the lowest bids. In other instances, what was purchased was not what was delivered.

"Is there anything in there that might indicate to us that there might be some potential fraudulent activity?" Jeffrey Parsons, director of contracting at Army Materiel Command, said in an AP interview. "If there are patterns that we start to identify, then we're going to do further review."

Contracts with significant problems will be forwarded to the Army Audit Agency and the Army Criminal Investigation Command. If there's credible evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI and prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department are called in.

In Warren, Mich., home to a large Army acquisition center, the contracting review team will examine 314 of the Kuwait contracts, each worth more than $25,000 and issued between 2003 and 2006.

In Kuwait, a separate team of 10 at Camp Arifjan is already going through 339 contracts of lesser value and awarded during the same time period, according to Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir, Va.

Both reviews are to be finished before the end of the year.

Preliminary results of an investigation into the contracts coming out of Camp Arifjan in 2007 has wrapped up, and the investigators uncovered numerous problems with the office, including high staff turnover, slip-shod record keeping, inadequate staffing, and lack of oversight. Those personnel problems, coupled with billions of dollars of war funding, create an environment where corruption, malfeasance and misconduct find fertile soil.

The investigative teams in both Michigan and Kuwait will be reviewing paper records, but they will also be using data-mining techniques to search electronically stored data for signs of wrongdoing. "Do we have contractors with different names but the same address?" Parsons said. "That would cause some suspicion." He also indicated that the investigators would be relying on tips provided by individuals familiar with the imperfect process.

If a contractor and an acquisitions officer conspire to break the rules for personal gain, uncovering the corruption can be extremely difficult. "You can have a contract file that is pristine - all the documentation is there," Parsons said. "Just going through the contract files doesn't necessarily give you 100 percent assurance that something else might not have been going on."

Beating the checks and balances in the federal procurement process is a difficult trick to pull off, requiring attention to detail and precise planning. It takes someone schooled in the system to know how to evade it. Unfortunately, the Army had some very smart "bad apples" who knew how to pull it off.

The 6000 contracts that came from the office in Kuwait spawned 18,000 transactions for myriad support items, from laundry and warehouse services to bottled water and food. Every transaction presented an opportunity for fraud to be committed.

In 2005, two Lt. Generals who were top commanders in Iraq, Steven Whitcomb and John Vines, became so concerned about allegations of corruption that they pushed for the Criminal Investigation Command to establish field offices in Iraq and Kuwait.

The Army investigating the allegations of fraud, abuse, bribery, corruption and kickbacks is a good start, but it is time to take a page from history. It is time for a reprise of the Truman Committee.

In 1940, as World War II gripped the globe and United States involvement in the conflict became more and more likely, the United States appropriated $10 Billion in defense contracts in preparation for that eventuality.

Early in 1941, reports of malfeasance and abuses by the contractors reached Missouri Senator Harry S Truman, and the news did not sit well with WW I Infantry Captain “Give ‘em Hell Harry.” In typical Truman fashion, he set out to seek the truth, not by summoning “experts” but by embarking on a 10,000 mile tour of military installations. On this fact-finding tour, he discovered that the companies that received the contracts were clustered in the east, with a mere handful divvying up most of the largesse. He also discovered that they were receiving a fixed-profit, regardless of performance.

He returned to the Senate convinced that the defense efforts of the United States were being undermined by waste and corruption, and he proposed the notion of a special Senate committee that would investigate the National Defense Program.

President Roosevelt was convinced to let Truman head up the committee, being sympathetic to the President and his administration. The President was assured that the committee would not be too much trouble, as it would only be allotted $15,000 to investigate billions in defense contracts.

The Truman Committee was created by unanimous Senate decree on 01 March 1941. Over the next three years, with Senator Truman at the helm, the committee held hundreds of hearings, traveled thousands of miles to conduct field inspections, and saved millions of dollars in cost over-runs. Senator Truman was not shy about threatening executives with prison time as he whacked greedy corporate snouts out of the public trough.

Before Claire McCaskill announced her Senate bid, I was encouraging her to run for the Class I seat that Truman once held, and touting her background as our state auditor and as a tough prosecutor as reasons she should run and reasons we should vote for her, because the Iraq fiasco needed a good auditing, in the spirit of Harry Truman.

During her campaign, she seized on my the idea of a modern day Truman Committee to investigate waste, fraud and corruption in the reconstruction of Iraq. During a speech in Harry S Truman’s hometown of Independence last year, she spoke admiringly of the former President and his diligence in reining in war profiteers. "He was fearless. He uncovered enormous undeserved profits. I believe we need a new Truman Committee. I will fight for such a committee.”

Less than a year after she was elected, and a mere nine months after taking her seat, she is very close to bringing the notion to fruition. The Senate recently agreed to a plan from Senators McCaskill and Webb to get a handle on the Pentagon’s scattershot method of awarding private contracts for work in Iraq. It was added to the Defense Authorization Bill for 2008.

The audits that get underway on Monday certainly underscore the need for the oversight body that would be created from the legislation offered by Webb and McCaskill. In fact, they demand it.