War Criminals hard at work robbing the taxpayer ...CBS 60 Minutes tells the tale Sunday

CBS 60 minutes for those lucky enough to live in the land of the free this Sunday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m. ET/PT,60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft investigates the billions spent on reconstruction-related work, particularly money paid to a contractor, Custer Battles, now being sued for fraud.(Heading pic is from the www.custerbattles.com website ...)

Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, claims $8.8 billion is unaccounted for by failures of the CPA. (see previous posts).

The former No. 2 man at the CPA transportation ministry, Frank Willis, agrees. "I would describe (the accounting system) as nonexistent." Without a financial infrastructure, checks and money transfers were not possible, so the Coalition kept billions in cash to pay for its multitude of projects. "Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed $100 bills. It was the Wild West," says Willis.

Billions have gone missing and Custer Battles, a company quickly formed after the war to get reconstruction contracts, goes on trial next week, accused in a whistleblower suit by an ex-employee of bilking the U.S. government out of $50 million.

"(Custer Battles) wanted to open fraudulent companies overseas and inflate their invoices to the U.S. government," says Robert Isakson. He says he refused to go along with the scheme and "two weeks later, apparently I heard they began exactly the fraud they described to me," he tells Kroft in the 60 Minutes program.

Willis remembers Custer Battles, which was formed by former Army Rangers Scott Custer and Mike Battles, ex- bull rider who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2002 as a Rhode Island Republican, was a former CIA case worker and claimed White House connections.

"They came in with a can-do attitude, whether they could or not," he says. "They were not experienced. They didn’t know what they were doing."

They nevertheless got contracts and their work quickly drew complaints.

"They failed miserably," says Col. Richard Ballard the inspector general for the Army in Iraq at the timeof a $16.8 million contract Custer Battles got to secure the Baghdad Airport, he says the company failed to provide the X-ray equipment required by the contract.See the contract hereat the Taxpayers against Fraud website.

"These were multi-million-dollar devices for which they received a considerable cash advance so that they could procure them, and then they never procured this equipment," says Ballard.

On a bomb-sniffing dog and trainer Custer Battles did procure, Col. Ballard says, "I think it was a guy and his pet, to be honest with you," he tells Kroft. The colonel noted that the dog "would refuse to sniff the vehicles."

In a memo obtained by 60 Minutes, the airport’s director of security wrote to the CPA: "Custer Battles has shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows."

The CPA didn't remove Custer Battles and continued to give them contracts. One of those contracts involved procuring trucks for moving cash around the country — some of which were inoperative and had to be delivered via tow truck.

"I don't really know (how they got away with it)," says British Col. Philip Wilkinson, to whom the trucks were delivered. "The assumption that we had was that they had to have high political top cover ..."

Custer and Battles are now under federal investigation and declined to be interviewed. But in taped depositions, they disavowed any knowledge of fraudulent invoices outlined in the lawsuit.

See an April 2005 AP report filed by Deborah Hastings for more detailed information including how Pete Baldwin was in charge of the project to move money became a whistelblower as well. He complained – first to his Custer Battles bosses, then to the military, and finally to Pentagon investigators and the FBI.

This is a tale of greed, venality, incompetence, dishonesty that boggles the mind.

Go to the Custer Battles website there is a wonderful piece of puffery in their copies of Press releases (which all make fascinating reading) from the WSJ. Read it here and wonder.

You couldn't make this fucking tale up...