quote:A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed "the rain forest."
"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."
It's getting to the point where I'm almost thinking that it would be better if the Bush administration set out to screw up royally in Iraq. This is, in many ways, more comforting than having the things that the leader of my country is telling me he is really focusing on turning out to be such collossal screw-ups.
I want Iraq to be a success. I want, for example, to see a well-trained and supplied Iraqi police force take over most of the security roles and become the backbone of an orderly, peaceful society. This is something I consider very important.
It's too bad that it seems like the people in charge of Iraq don't share these beliefs.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I'm curious to the cause of this problem, and the seemingly never-ending stream of difficulties. Are people with no experience and skills being put in charge of important projects, and if so why? Are forces within the country intentionally undermining our efforts, and each other's efforts (apart from the obvious insurgents)?
We're the most powerful country in the world for goodness sake. It's embarrassing that we can't get this together.
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There is an effort that has been made to hire Iraqi contractors to do as much work as possible and to take a hands off approach to create trust. The inspector general could have checked things during construction instead of after, and certainly the ones who fix the problem will be Army Engineers or Western Civilian contractors. There is no incentive to do good work because after the construction is condemed, Iraqi's will get paid to rebuild. It is sad that perhaps the reason we are failing in Iraq may have nothing to do with the excellence of our soldiers or the political theories of our administration, it may simply be that the Iraqi's are not to be trusted to act in their own collective interest.
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quote:Federal investigators said the inspector general's findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.
The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.
"The truth needs to be told about what we didn't get for our dollar from Parsons," Bowen said.
Sax, Did you not read the article or do you just not have any shame? Do you care about succeding in Iraq at all?
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I care that we make the best effort we can to give the Iraqi's a chance to have their chance at something better. Only they can grasp the ring. I hope they do, they have a long way to go.
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I can tell how much care from the way you reacted to an article talking about failures of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in oversight and of a U.S. company that has a history of failure there with casual racism.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Yes, and I am not quick to believe in racially motivated shoddyness and our army being full of poor engineers over the shoddy workmanship of shoddy workman, keep things simple.
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quote:Yes, and I am not quick to believe in racially motivated shoddyness and our army being full of poor engineers over the shoddy workmanship of shoddy workman, keep things simple.
I'm not quite sure what this means. Perhaps you could rephrase it?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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In some ways the political process hampers the construction. The rules under which the contractors function in Iraq includes an initiative to pump up the Iraq economy by hiring local workers, another affirmative action project. To meet that requirement they must fill in jobs with those workers that are willing to show up and are unafraid to seem like collaborators. Workers with fake resumes or who show up knowing that they need do little or nothing to keep the job because they are filling in a local worker slot. Concrete is not well mixed, pipes are not well sealed, nobody doing the actual work really cares because they are not held accountable. Then the inspector comes in and says 'no go' and the Corps has to go in and try to make it work or order it condemned. That is the process, it is easy to imagine that the military sympathizes with the contractors so hamstrung and the article makes it clear that the responsibility falls on Iraqi subcontractors who are being forced to redo work they are responsible for. It takes time to teach responsibility from scratch in a social order that had different standards for different social groups instead of a single code for all construction. A society where a professional sounding title with years of experience might have been nothing more then sitting home and drawing a government check from a brother-in-laws government department. Things take time to shake down. Tell me what needs to be a greater priority, building things to code quickly and efficiently as the military and foreign workers could, or getting the unemployment rate down and putting dollars in the hands of Iraqi's and their economy? Not as simple a problem that Post article makes it to be.
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quote:Federal investigators said the inspector general's findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.
The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.
"The truth needs to be told about what we didn't get for our dollar from Parsons," Bowen said.
The Army Corps of Engineers took money to oversee this project. They either didn't oversee it or did a very poor job. Likewise, Parsons was given a whole heap of money for projects that they are not coming through on.
There are plenty of Iraqi contractors who have done very good work in the reconstruction. Baghdad isn't some den of thieves with everyone out to take advantage and damn the consequences.
When you take on a job, especially one as important as the main Iraqi police academy, you are responsible for it being done correctly. When you agree and take money to oversee it, you are supposed to actually oversee it.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by General Sax: ... Concrete is not well mixed, pipes are not well sealed, nobody doing the actual work really cares because they are not held accountable. Then the inspector comes in and says 'no go' and the Corps has to go in and try to make it work or order it condemned. That is the process, ...
Ummm, if the Corps is getting 4.5% of total costs on the Police College (and other projects), then supposedly they don't just wait around sitting on their hands until an outside inspector demonstrates that the buildings are a shoddy joke. They're supposed to earn that fee, by making the contractors accountable. Same with Parsons Corp., which according to the Inspector General has a horrific track record in Iraq. Neither group exercised due diligence on the Police Academy project.
You can't pin this all on subcontractors--Parsons as general contractor has ultimate responibility, and the Corps slscked off as well.
quote: Los Angeles Daily News
WASHINGTON - The Army Corps of Engineers glowingly touted ''infrastructure improvements'' at the Baghdad Police Academy less than a month before the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction issued a blistering account of shoddy construction and absent oversight at the $75 million building.
The Army Corps' federal monitoring of the project is expected to be part of a detailed follow-up investigation that auditors will release this month into Pasadena-based Parsons Corp., responsible for building the facility, officials said Thursday.
Inspector General spokesman Jim Mitchell said the Army Corps' statements, made in an August news release bragging about the construction, were disturbing.
He said auditors obtained e-mails showing that Army Corps officials knew as early as April that there were problems, including plumbing work that allowed water and human waste seeped from the ceilings.
posted
What did they even spend $75 Million on? Is it just poor quality of construction, or were the materials substandard too?
I don't even know how the building can cost that much and come out so incredibly bad. Is there access anywhere to a breakdown on what was spent on materials and what was spent on labor? If Iraqi labor was being used, I don't see how that much could've been spent on it.
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The Army Corps of Engineers does not 'take money' they are not a for profit corporation, they receive a budget to do a job and the men in it receive pay as soldiers in their pay grade. The administrative overhead for oversight of the project may be 4.5% But I doubt that was the budget that was given the local Engineering Unit as discretionary money. That is Pentagon money. I think a much more important is how many man hours are tasked to the over-site rather then what dollars are theoretically available. Man-hours are the real coin in Iraq for our overtaxed soldiers.
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So, in other words, GS, the money was set aside (as budgeted) to provide oversight on a project, and then, due to <insert reason here> that oversight billet was not properly filled.
Given that such oversight could have been provided either by uniformed personnel or contractors, it seems like the criticism still lies with the US Army for dropping the ball.
I didn't actually see anyone blaming the overtaxed soldiers.
Last time I checked, the Pentagon is still considered part of the US military. If the money is in place for a specific purpose and gets shunted somewhere else in the military, I suspect that what we're really looking at is a case of defrauding the American taxpayers.
Would you care to provide a rationale for why this makes perfect sense because of how lazy and incompetent the Iraqi people are?
Or should we just agree that the US military accepted funds, knew a job was required of it, and failed to live up to its end of the requirement.
Now...let's talk about reasons that might happen:
1) The military is NOT the right group to assign to this task. They aren't in the business of nation-building, and don't really prioritize the same way Congress might think they do.
2) There aren't enough of the "right kind" of people on the ground in Iraq. We still lack sufficient translators (I assume). Would it really be all that surprising to find out that qualified structural engineers and construction managers aren't exactly the folks we've got there right now?
3) Contracting, even in expedited situations (such as sole-sourcing huge chunks of things to the VP's retirement nest-egg) still takes huge amounts of time. It might be a real problem contracting with a qualified firm willing to send qualified engineers to a place like Iraq. Or maybe someone in the procurement chain didn't do his/her job and the contract stalled...
Maybe you can think of other circumstances?
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