At Hearing On
Iraq Contract Abuses, Leahy Pushes For Accountability
WASHINGTON (Monday,
September 18) -- The Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) held
a hearing Monday on efforts to seek accountability for contracting
abuses in Iraq. The Committee heard from a Halliburton
whistleblower, who described how materials intended to help bolster
the morale of U.S. soldiers in Iraq were diverted to benefit the
company, as well as from attorneys for both the whistleblower and
survivors of an April 2004 convoy attack.
Senator Patrick Leahy,
(D-Vt.), who has led efforts in Congress to target war-profiteers,
participated in the hearing. Leahy is a senior member of the
Appropriations Committee and its Defense and Foreign Operations
Subcommittees, as well as the ranking Democratic member of the
Judiciary Committee.
Earlier this year, Leahy
co-sponsored a reform bill that would make it a crime to exploit
taxpayer-funded war reconstruction and disaster relief efforts.
Leahy introduced a similar bill in 2003, which was passed by the
Senate as part of an appropriations bill, but later torpedoed by the
White House and the House Republican leadership, which stripped out
the Leahy provision.
Below is Senator Leahy’s
statement from Monday’s hearing, followed by a recent article in
The Washington Post chronicling some of the contract abuses in
Iraq.
# # # # #
Statement of Senator
Patrick Leahy
Democratic Policy Committee Hearing
On “Efforts to Seek Accountability for Contracting Abuses in Iraq”
September 18, 2006
Chairman Dorgan, thank
you for inviting me to participate in this important oversight
hearing on efforts to seek accountability for contracting abuses in
Iraq. This ongoing project is in keeping with the spirit of the
anti-war profiteering efforts of the Truman Commission of an earlier
age, and I am pleased to join you and Senators Reid, Dayton and
Bingaman in these oversight efforts.
Yesterday, The
Washington Post reported what most Americans already knew –
cronyism and political loyalty to the Bush-Cheney Administration
trumped expertise and competence in the Administration’s
reconstruction policy in Iraq.
According to this
report, many who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority,
which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, “lacked
vital skills and experience” to do the job. Because of this
incompetence, Iraq today is a country that lacks basic services, is
plagued by daily insurgent attacks and is on the brink of a civil
war.
Our military commanders
know what is at stake and how waste and fraud undercut the
reconstruction effort that is so essential to success.
This past week, in
response to the Marine intelligence report on al Qaeda's gaining a
stronghold in Anbar province, General Chiarelli emphasized that
military strategy alone cannot create the conditions for success.
He said that the "real heart" of the matter is that it is, quote,
"economic and political conditions that have to improve at Al
Amnbar, as they do everywhere in Iraq, for us to be successful."
Contractor fraud undermines these efforts, threatening the safety
and success of our troops. That is why squander in the name of
defense is doubly offensive and doubly harmful.
Yet contractor waste,
fraud and abuse in Iraq continues. Congress has sent more than a
quarter of a trillion dollars to Iraq with too little
accountability and too few financial controls.
From the growing number
of reports that Halliburton and others have defrauded our Government
out of millions of taxpayer dollars, to deeply troubling allegations
that Government contractors have knowingly put their employees in
harm’s way, it is clear that the Administration’s approach to
reconstruction in Iraq has been a formula for mischief. Yet – as
the witnesses here will attest – the Bush-Cheney Administration has
allowed this rampant war profiteering in Iraq to go on, at the
expense of our troops and of American taxpayers.
To date, the Justice
Department has not brought a single case against a contractor
to recover funds stolen in Iraq. The Bush-Cheney Administration and
its allies have also repeatedly blocked the various efforts of many
of us to combat war profiteering.
Earlier this year I
again introduced the “War Profiteering Prevention Act of
2006,” which creates criminal penalties for war profiteers and
cheats who, for ill-gotten gain, would exploit the Government’s war
and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.
I first introduced this bill in 2003, and, for the last three years,
the Republican-led Congress has repeatedly refused to pass this
legislation.
The cronyism and
failures with the reconstruction effort in Iraq raise important
issues for the success of our troops on the ground. It is hard to
win what the military calls the battle for the “hearts and minds” of
Iraqis when they are still without basic services and watch as
reconstruction funds are being syphoned off by U.S. contractors.
This is an urgent
matter, often with life-or-death consequences. We need more
accountability, we must do better. I am pleased that the Democratic
Policy Committee is willing to pursue the truth about the situation
in Iraq and to seek accountability. The American people expect and
deserve a Congress that will do its job.
# # # # #
Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among
Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq
Early U.S. Missteps in the Green
Zone
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 17, 2006; A01
Adapted from "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv
Chandrasekaran, copyright Knopf 2006
After
the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the
opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct
Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals,
Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone
adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get
past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To
pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens
prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts,
applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in
post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty
to the Bush administration.
O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about
domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you
support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two
people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they
were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
Many
of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition
Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003
to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who
had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job
-- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a
prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an
evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to
manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a
background in accounting.
The
decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and
the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2
-year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush
administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of
their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a
conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked
more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among
the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the
reconstruction effort.
The
CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes,
deploy police and spend Iraq's oil revenue. It had more than 1,500
employees in Baghdad at its height, working under America's viceroy
in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but never released a public roster of its
entire staff.
Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two
years depict an organization that was dominated -- and ultimately
hobbled -- by administration ideologues.
"We
didn't tap -- and it should have started from the White House on
down -- just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said
Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's
Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people
who went out there because of their political leanings."
Endowed with $18 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds and a
comparatively quiescent environment in the immediate aftermath of
the U.S. invasion, the CPA was the U.S. government's first and best
hope to resuscitate Iraq -- to establish order, promote rebuilding
and assemble a viable government, all of which, experts believe,
would have constricted the insurgency and mitigated the chances of
civil war. Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish
today in Iraq -- training the army, vetting the police, increasing
electricity generation -- could have been performed far more
effectively in 2003 by the CPA.
But
many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in
instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending
food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot
like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in
the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with
towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size
swimming pools.
By
the time Bremer departed in June 2004, Iraq was in a precarious
state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and refashioned by
the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy
percent of police officers had not been screened or trained.
Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to
achieve. And Iraq's interim government had been selected not by
elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved
later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters
would fuel civil strife.
To
recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the
offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP
activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed
ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic
language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.
Smith
said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced
him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had
worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential
election recount in 2000.
O'Beirne, a former Army officer who is married to prominent
conservative commentator Kate O'Beirne, did not respond to requests
for comment.
He
and his staff used an obscure provision in federal law to hire many
CPA staffers as temporary political appointees, which exempted the
interviewers from employment regulations that prohibit questions
about personal political beliefs.
There
were a few Democrats who wound up getting jobs with the CPA, but
almost all of them were active-duty soldiers or State Department
Foreign Service officers. Because they were career government
employees, not temporary hires, O'Beirne's office could not query
them directly about their political leanings.
One
former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an
e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched
résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to
help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the
President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was
'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like
Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in
Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican
National Committee) contributors."
As
more and more of O'Beirne's hires arrived in the Green Zone, the
CPA's headquarters in Hussein's marble-walled former Republican
Palace felt like a campaign war room. Bumper stickers and mouse pads
praising President Bush were standard desk decorations. In addition
to military uniforms and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" garb,
"Bush-Cheney 2004" T-shirts were among the most common pieces of
clothing.
"I'm
not here for the Iraqis," one staffer noted to a reporter over
lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."
When
Gordon Robison, who worked in the Strategic Communications office,
opened a care package from his mother to find a book by Paul
Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, people around him
stared. "It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick," he
recalled.
Finance Background Not Required
Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from
Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a
commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and
although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take
Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.
He
had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American
occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an
e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a
White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for
Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any
job openings in Baghdad?
"Be
careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he
forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office.
Three
weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him
in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?
The
day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA
official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a
major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with
President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him
to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.
"Are
you sure?" Hallen said to Foley. "I don't have a finance
background."
It's
fine, Foley replied. He told Hallen that he was to be the project
manager. He would rely on other people to get things done. He would
be "the main point of contact."
Before the war, Baghdad's stock exchange looked nothing like its
counterparts elsewhere in the world. There were no computers,
electronic displays or men in colorful coats scurrying around on the
trading floor. Trades were scrawled on pieces of paper and noted on
large blackboards. If you wanted to buy or sell, you came to the
exchange yourself and shouted your order to one of the traders.
There was no air-conditioning. It was loud and boisterous. But it
worked. Private firms raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by
selling stock, and ordinary people learned about free enterprise.
The
exchange was gutted by looters after the war. The first wave of
American economic reconstruction specialists from the Treasury
Department ignored it. They had bigger issues to worry about: paying
salaries, reopening the banks, stabilizing the currency. But the
brokers wanted to get back to work and investors wanted their money,
so the CPA made the reopening a priority.
Quickly absorbing the CPA's ambition during the optimistic days
before the insurgency flared, Hallen decided that he didn't just
want to reopen the exchange, he wanted to make it the best, most
modern stock market in the Arab world. He wanted to promulgate a new
securities law that would make the exchange independent of the
Finance Ministry, with its own bylaws and board of directors. He
wanted to set up a securities and exchange commission to oversee the
market. He wanted brokers to be licensed and listed companies to
provide financial disclosures. He wanted to install a computerized
trading and settlement system.
Iraqis cringed at Hallen's plan. Their top priority was reopening
the exchange, not setting up computers or enacting a new securities
law. "People are broke and bewildered," broker Talib Tabatabai told
Hallen. "Why do you want to create enemies? Let us open the way we
were."
Tabatabai, who held a doctorate in political science from Florida
State University, believed Hallen's plan was unrealistic. "It was
something so fancy, so great, that it couldn't be accomplished," he
said.
But
Hallen was convinced that major changes had to be enacted. "Their
laws and regulations were completely out of step with the modern
world," he said. "There was just no transparency in anything. It was
more of a place for Saddam and his friends to buy up private
companies that they otherwise didn't have a stake in."
Opening the stock exchange without legal and structural changes,
Hallen maintained, "would have been irresponsible and
short-sighted."
To
help rewrite the securities law, train brokers and purchase the
necessary computers, Hallen recruited a team of American volunteers.
In the spring of 2004, Bremer approved the new law and
simultaneously appointed the nine Iraqis selected by Hallen to
become the exchange's board of governors.
The
exchange's board selected Tabatabai as its chairman. The new
securities law that Hallen had nursed into life gave the board
control over the exchange's operations, but it didn't say a thing
about the role of the CPA adviser. Hallen assumed that he'd have a
part in decision-making until the handover of sovereignty. Tabatabai
and the board, however, saw themselves in charge.
Tabatabai and the other governors decided to open the market as soon
as possible. They didn't want to wait several more months for the
computerized trading system to be up and running. They ordered
dozens of dry-erase boards to be installed on the trading floor.
They used such boards to keep track of buying and selling prices
before the war, and that's how they'd do it again.
The
exchange opened two days after Hallen's tour in Iraq ended. Brokers
barked orders to floor traders, who used their trusty white boards.
Transactions were recorded not with computers but with small chits
written in ink. CPA staffers stayed away, afraid that their presence
would make the stock market a target for insurgents.
When
Tabatabai was asked what would have happened if Hallen hadn't been
assigned to reopen the exchange, he smiled. "We would have opened
months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not
materialize," Tabatabai said of Hallen. "Those CPA people reminded
me of Lawrence of Arabia."
'Loyalist' Replaces Public Health Expert
The
hiring of Bremer's most senior advisers was settled upon at the
highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. Some, like
Foley, were personally recruited by Bush. Others got their jobs
because an influential Republican made a call on behalf of a friend
or trusted colleague.
That's what happened with James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to
oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.
Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among
international health experts, but he had connections. He had been
the community health director for the former Republican governor of
Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the
deputy secretary of defense.
Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in
his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based
relief organization that provided health care while promoting
Christianity in the developing world. Before his stint in
government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in
Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.
Haveman replaced Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a physician with a
master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from
Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and the University of California at
Berkeley. Burkle taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues, and he was
a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for
International Development, which sent him to Baghdad immediately
after the war.
He
had worked in Kosovo and Somalia and in northern Iraq after the 1991
Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague called him the "single most
talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for
the United States government."
But a
week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed he was being
replaced. A senior official at USAID sent Burkle an e-mail saying
the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of
degrees, but he didn't have a picture with the president.
Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk
about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and
the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the
still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many
physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq.
He approached problems the way a health care administrator in
America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need
for hospital treatment.
He
urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he
assigned an American from the CPA team -- who turned out to be a
closet smoker himself -- to lead the public education effort.
Several members of Haveman's staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far
greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA's limited
resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about
how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.
Haveman didn't like the idea that medical care in Iraq was free. He
figured Iraqis should pay a small fee every time they saw a doctor.
He also decided to allocate almost all of the Health Ministry's $793
million share of U.S. reconstruction funds to renovating maternity
hospitals and building new community medical clinics. His intention,
he said, was "to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don't get
health care unless you go to a hospital."
But
his decision meant there were no reconstruction funds set aside to
rehabilitate the emergency rooms and operating theaters at Iraqi
hospitals, even though injuries from insurgent attacks were the
country's single largest public health challenge.
Haveman also wanted to apply American medicine to other parts of the
Health Ministry. Instead of trying to restructure the dysfunctional
state-owned firm that imported and distributed drugs and medical
supplies to hospitals, he decided to try to sell it to a private
company.
To
prepare it for a sale, he wanted to attempt something he had done in
Michigan. When he was the state's director of community health, he
sought to slash the huge amount of money Michigan spent on
prescription drugs for the poor by limiting the medications doctors
could prescribe for Medicaid patients. Unless they received an
exemption, physicians could only prescribe drugs that were on an
approved list, known as a formulary.
Haveman figured the same strategy could bring down the cost of
medicine in Iraq. The country had 4,500 items on its drug formulary.
Haveman deemed it too large. If private firms were going to bid for
the job of supplying drugs to government hospitals, they needed a
smaller, more manageable list. A new formulary would also outline
new requirements about where approved drugs could be manufactured,
forcing Iraq to stop buying medicines from Syria, Iran and Russia,
and start buying from the United States.
He
asked the people who had drawn up the formulary in Michigan whether
they wanted to come to Baghdad. They declined. So he beseeched the
Pentagon for help. His request made its way to the Defense
Department's Pharmacoeconomic Center in San Antonio.
A few
weeks later, three formulary experts were on their way to Iraq.
The
group was led by Theodore Briski, a balding, middle-aged pharmacist
who held the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy.
Haveman's order, as Briski remembered it, was: "Build us a formulary
in two weeks and then go home." By his second day in Iraq, Briski
came to three conclusions. First, the existing formulary "really
wasn't that bad." Second, his mission was really about "redesigning
the entire Iraqi pharmaceutical procurement and delivery system, and
that was a complete change of scope -- on a grand scale." Third,
Haveman and his advisers "really didn't know what they were doing."
Haveman "viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack," said George
Guszcza, an Army captain who worked on the CPA's health team.
"Somehow if you went into the ghettos and projects of Michigan and
just extended it out for the entire state -- that's what he was
coming to save."
Haveman's critics, including more than a dozen people who worked for
him in Baghdad, contend that rewriting the formulary was a
distraction. Instead, they said, the CPA should have focused on
restructuring, but not privatizing, the drug-delivery system and on
ordering more emergency shipments of medicine to address shortages
of essential medicines. The first emergency procurement did not
occur until early 2004, after the Americans had been in Iraq for
more than eight months.
Haveman insisted that revising the formulary was a crucial first
step in improving the distribution of medicines. "It was unwieldy to
order 4,500 different drugs, and to test and distribute them," he
said.
When
Haveman left Iraq, Baghdad's hospitals were as decrepit as the day
the Americans arrived. At Yarmouk Hospital, the city's largest,
rooms lacked the most basic equipment to monitor a patient's blood
pressure and heart rate, operating theaters were without modern
surgical tools and sterile implements, and the pharmacy's shelves
were bare.
Nationwide, the Health Ministry reported that 40 percent of the 900
drugs it deemed essential were out of stock in hospitals. Of the 32
medicines used in public clinics for the management of chronic
diseases, 26 were unavailable.
The
new health minister, Aladin Alwan, beseeched the United Nations for
help, and he asked neighboring nations to share what they could. He
sought to increase production at a state-run manufacturing plant in
the city of Samarra. And he put the creation of a new formulary on
hold. To him, it was a fool's errand.
"We
didn't need a new formulary. We needed drugs," he said. "But the
Americans did not understand that."
A
9/11 Hero's Public Relations Blitz
In
May 2003, a team of law enforcement experts from the Justice
Department concluded that more than 6,600 foreign advisers were
needed to help rehabilitate Iraq's police forces.
The
White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.
Bernard Kerik had more star power than Bremer and everyone else in
the CPA combined. Soldiers stopped him in the halls of the
Republican Palace to ask for his autograph or, if they had a camera,
a picture. Reporters were more interested in interviewing him than
they were the viceroy.
Kerik
had been New York City's police commissioner when terrorists
attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His courage (he
shouted evacuation orders from a block away as the south tower
collapsed), his stamina (he worked around the clock and catnapped in
his office for weeks), and his charisma (he was a master of the
television interview) turned him into a national hero. When White
House officials were casting about for a prominent individual to
take charge of Iraq's Interior Ministry and assume the challenge of
rebuilding the Iraqi police, Kerik's name came up. Bush pronounced
it an excellent idea.
Kerik
had worked in the Middle East before, as the security director for a
government hospital in Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled from the
country amid a government investigation into his surveillance of the
medical staff. He lacked postwar policing experience, but the White
House viewed that as an asset.
Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed
to the goal of democratizing the region. Post-conflict experts, many
of whom worked for the State Department, the United Nations or
nongovernmental organizations, were deemed too liberal. Men such as
Kerik -- committed Republicans with an accomplished career in
business or government -- were ideal. They were loyal, and they
shared the Bush administration's goal of rebuilding Iraq in an
American image. With Kerik, there were bonuses: The media loved him,
and the American public trusted him.
Robert Gifford, a State Department expert in international law
enforcement, was one of the first CPA staff members to meet Kerik
when he arrived in Baghdad. Gifford was the senior adviser to the
Interior Ministry, which oversaw the police. Kerik was to take over
Gifford's job.
"I
understand you are going to be the man, and we are here to support
you," Gifford told Kerik.
"I'm
here to bring more media attention to the good work on police
because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is,"
Kerik replied.
As
they entered the Interior Ministry office in the palace, Gifford
offered to brief Kerik. "It was during that period I realized he
wasn't with me," Gifford recalled. "He didn't listen to anything. He
hadn't read anything except his e-mails. I don't think he read a
single one of our proposals."
Kerik
wasn't a details guy. He was content to let Gifford figure out how
to train Iraqi officers to work in a democratic society. Kerik would
take care of briefing the viceroy and the media. And he'd be going
out for a few missions himself.
Kerik's first order of business, less than a week after he arrived,
was to give a slew of interviews saying the situation was improving.
He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad "is not as bad
as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of
control? No. Is it getting better? Yes." He went on NBC's "Today"
show to pronounce the situation "better than I expected." To Time
magazine, he said that "people are starting to feel more confident.
They're coming back out. Markets and shops that I saw closed one
week ago have opened."
When
it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of
South African bodyguards, and he packed a 9mm handgun under his
safari vest.
The
first months after liberation were a critical period for Iraq's
police. Officers needed to be called back to work and screened for
Baath Party connections. They'd have to learn about due process, how
to interrogate without torture, how to walk the beat. They required
new weapons. New chiefs had to be selected. Tens of thousands more
officers would have to be hired to put the genie of anarchy back in
the bottle.
Kerik
held only two staff meetings while in Iraq, one when he arrived and
the other when he was being shadowed by a New York Times reporter,
according to Gerald Burke, a former Massachusetts State Police
commander who participated in the initial Justice Department
assessment mission. Despite his White House connections, Kerik did
not secure funding for the desperately needed police advisers. With
no help on the way, the task of organizing and training Iraqi
officers fell to U.S. military police soldiers, many of whom had no
experience in civilian law enforcement.
"He
was the wrong guy at the wrong time," Burke said later. "Bernie
didn't have the skills. What we needed was a chief executive-level
person. . . . Bernie came in with a street-cop mentality."
Kerik
authorized the formation of a hundred-man Iraqi police paramilitary
unit to pursue criminal syndicates that had formed since the war,
and he often joined the group on nighttime raids, departing the
Green Zone at midnight and returning at dawn, in time to attend
Bremer's senior staff meeting, where he would crack a few jokes,
describe the night's adventures and read off the latest crime
statistics prepared by an aide. The unit did bust a few kidnapping
gangs and car-theft rings, generating a stream of positive news
stories that Kerik basked in and Bremer applauded. But the
all-nighters meant Kerik wasn't around to supervise the Interior
Ministry during the day. He was sleeping.
Several members of the CPA's Interior Ministry team wanted to blow
the whistle on Kerik, but they concluded any complaints would be
brushed off. "Bremer's staff thought he was the silver bullet," a
member of the Justice Department assessment mission said. "Nobody
wanted to question the [man who was] police chief during 9/11."
Kerik
contended that he did his best in what was, ultimately, an untenable
situation. He said he wasn't given sufficient funding to hire
foreign police advisers or establish large-scale training programs.
Three
months after he arrived, Kerik attended a meeting of local police
chiefs in Baghdad's Convention Center. When it was his turn to
address the group, he stood and bid everyone farewell. Although he
had informed Bremer of his decision a few days earlier, Kerik hadn't
told most of the people who worked for him. He flew out of Iraq a
few hours later.
"I
was in my own world," he said later. "I did my own thing."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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