I have been concerned for years that whistleblowers who have filed qui tam False Claims Act cases have been unable to talk because their cases have been under seal for years. Considering the concerns of the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan, I wrote this piece for Truthout.org.

I felt the usual dread as I settled down to watch the hearings by the congressional Wartime Contracting Commission on Tuesday and Wednesday. I have now spent thirty years listening to hearing after hearing on the horrors of military procurement and have been up to my ears the last...

I have been writing about the problems with Iraq and Afghanistan contractor KBR since 2006 but the beat goes on. My co-author, Robert Bauman (Betraying Our Troops: the destructive results of privatizing war), has written an explanation of why we keep giving the contracts to a company that overcharges...

Secretary Gates has now officially rattled Washington with his surprisingly wide set of cuts to congressionally favored weapon systems and a shifting of priorities on the type of war to fight. Will the Congress and the entrenched Cold Warriors in the Pentagon let him get away with doing the right...

The largest Iraq war contractor, the one most responsible for feeding and taking care of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has committed "negligent homicide" according to an Army investigator. This investigator's report was leaked to the AP yesterday. KBR, a former division of Halliburton, was...

President-elect Obama has a very full plate of problems and there is increasing pressure for him to find ways to pay for them. It seems like every group has their hand out claiming that they need more money in these bad economic times. As messy as these problems are, there...

The Associated Press wrote a story, posted this morning as one of the lead stories on Huffington Post, on the Army's efforts to appoint five new Army generals to overhaul and oversee the disastrous contracting problems, especially in Iraq. The OMB at the White House rejected the plan....

Charles Smith, former chief of the Field Support Contracting Division of the Army Field Support Command, was in charge of overseeing the KBR's contract work in Iraq . He went public Tuesday on the front page of the New York Times, saying that he tried to...

The co-author of my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, has an interesting take on the DOD relying on contractors to report their own fraud. Robert Bauman is a former DCIS (Defense Criminal Investigative Service) investigator and is a Certified Fraud Examiner. Here is...

According to new estimates, we will soon be spending up to $12 billion a month on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and if current trends continue, this war effort will surpass the money spent in Vietnam. When I started looking at where the war money was going...

Senator Jim Webb has reintroduced an updated version of what he has dubbed "21st Century GI Bill" framed on the wildly successful GI Bill from World War II. With this war dragging on for six and one half years and our troops involuntary serving tour after tour, it is the...

Several weeks ago, I testified before a Senate subcommittee on the problems of Iraq contracting. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) and members of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) were also on the panel. Our testimony was followed by various officials from the DOD, State Department and USAID...

On Monday, Bush signed the 2008 Defense authorization bill into law. In it he singled out four of 2,887 sections for his now notorious signing statement. He said that these four provisions "purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to...

Tomorrow we will find out how serious the reform bent Democratic Senators are in getting control of Iraq contractors. Tomorrow at 2:30 pm EST (you can live stream it here) the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services and International Security of the Committee on Homeland Security...

In response to Senator John McCain's flip comments of spending thousands of years in Iraq, President Bush gave the war service industry a big boost to their financial bottom line. He said that the US could "easily" spend ten more years in Iraq.

This is music...

By now, many know the story of how the US lost track of around $9 billion in Iraqi assets and how corruption by US contractors and the Iraqi government has prevented much of the meaningful rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure. Now, according to a story in the

Today, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security will hold hearings on the alleged gang rape of former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones by her fellow KBR employees in Iraq. If true, this young woman's rape case is twice the tragedy: first the rape and...

Right now, Iraq's parliament is considering removing immunity from U.S. security contractors or possibly all U.S. contractor personnel. Some contractor employees have told the Los Angeles Times that they would stay and work anyway. Want to bet our troops lives on it? After the Iraqi police throw the first...

Today, the DOD Inspector General released a report showing that the military has lost track of about a billion dollars of equipment that they supplied to the Iraqi Security Forces. Here is another outrage on the war and even the most optimistic of people will agree that some of...

The President and the Congress are having a boxing match on the Iraq war money. Bush just went on television today with a grim face saying that if the Congress does not fund his $196 billion request for next year, the Pentagon will have to start laying...