Heralded Iraq Police Academy a 'Disaster'

The Baghdad Police College was built so poorly that feces and urine trickle from the ceilings, and floors rise inches off the ground and crack apart. Photo Credit: Photos By The Office Of The Special Inspector General For Iraq Reconstruction

Okay America--Guess where your taxpayer dollars are going in the Iraqi reconstruction? This is from The Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 -- 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."

Well how about that? A $75 million police college so badly constructed that feces and urin rain down from the ceilings and floors heaving up and cracking apart. An Iraqi police college--one of the more important institutions in Iraq that the U.S. needs to get running, so we can train enough Iraqi police and security forces to maintain control of the country so that the U.S. occupation forces can leave Iraq. A $75 million dollar "dump." Who built this "crap house?"

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.

A spokeswoman for Parsons said the company had not seen the inspector general's report.

The Coalition Provisional Authority hired Parsons in 2004 to transform the Baghdad Police College, a ramshackle collection of 1930s buildings, into a modern facility whose training capacity would expand from 1,500 recruits to at least 4,000. The contract called for the firm to remake the campus by building, among other things, eight three-story student barracks, classroom buildings and a central laundry facility.

It would appear that Parsons has been regularly providing crappy Iraqi reconstruction work for the U.S. taxpayer. I found this little story off ABC News' The Blotter:

Hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent to improve Iraqi healthcare have been squandered, according to some in Congress.

As an example of the wasted funds, Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) and others point to a $243 million contract that was awarded to the Parsons Corporation by the Army Corps of Engineers to build and repair 141 health clinics in Iraq. Three years after the contract was awarded, Parsons had spent $200 million on completing just 20 clinics.

In a hearing before the Democratic Policy Committee last week, doctors and healthcare workers testified about the conditions at the clinics that Parsons was paid to refurbish. Leaking roofs, cracked paint, moldy floors and broken light bulbs were just some of the problems listed by Dr. Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi physician and Fulbright scholar. But it is the sewage system that Dr. Fadhil said was the most significant problem.

"Parsons and its subcontractor created a sewer system that does not work, and that has resulted in raw sewage bubbling into the hospital's operating room and other critical areas," he told Congress.

The Army Corps of Engineers canceled the contract earlier this year after the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction issued a report blaming the corps for lax oversight of the contract.

Parsons Corporation said today that although only 20 clinic projects were completed, there was "a substantial amount of work" done on the remaining clinics in the contract. They also added that there was a funding issue and that not enough money was provided to complete the terms of the contract.

Sewage coming up from the floors of a Parsons-constructed hospital, urine raining down from a Parsons-constructed police academy--is there a connection here?

I found this little report by U.S. Labor Against The War. I don't know how reliable this information is, but I will include it here. Parsons Corporation has some connections within the Bush administration. According to this USLAW report:

Until 2001 its Board of Directors included current United States Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. Elaine Chao’s husband is Mitch McConnell, the assistant U.S. House of Representatives Majority leader and the chairman of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, a key foreign policy position. McConnell has links to defense contractor Northrop Grumman, and has received donations from Halliburton and arms firm Lockheed-Martin. Also sitting on Parsons’ board of Directors is Admiral RJ Zlaptoper, a former Commander-In-Chief for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. James NcNulty, Parsons’ Chairman and CEO, had a 24-year Army career before coming to Parsons in 1998.

Political Contributions: $249,401 contributed between 1999-2002. 61% of this went to Republicans (roughly $152,000), with $2000 given specifically to George W. Bush.

Guess the Bush administration is looking after its own constituents here. It is especially interesting how the connections flow from the top officials of the Bush administration to the top corporations that receive these fat contracts with almost no oversight. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chow was on Parson's board of directors. Multiply this connection hundreds or thousands of times through the various posts, assistant-deputy-secretaries, and offices that the Bush administration filled in its six-year reign, and you've got the perfect recipe for corporate waste and fraud. And Parsons is just one small example--I'm not sure I want to explore the fraud that Halliburton, Bechtel, or some of the other bigger companies have committed.

But let's get back to the original Post story here:

Complaints about the new facilities, however, began pouring in two weeks after the recruits arrived at the end of May, a Corps of Engineers official said.

The most serious problem was substandard plumbing that caused waste from toilets on the second and third floors to cascade throughout the building. A light fixture in one room stopped working because it was filled with urine and fecal matter. The waste threatened the integrity of load-bearing slabs, federal investigators concluded.

"When we walked down the halls, the Iraqis came running up and said, 'Please help us. Please do something about this,' " Bowen recalled.

Phillip A. Galeoto, director of the Baghdad Police College, wrote an Aug. 16 memo that catalogued at least 20 problems: shower and bathroom fixtures that leaked from the first day of occupancy, concrete and tile floors that heaved more than two inches off the ground, water rushing down hallways and stairwells because of improper slopes or drains in bathrooms, classroom buildings with foundation problems that caused structures to sink.

Galeoto noted that one entire building and five floors in others had to be shuttered for repairs, limiting the capacity of the college by up to 800 recruits. His memo, too, pointed out that the urine and feces flowed throughout the building and, sometimes, onto occupants of the barracks.

[....]

The Parsons contract, which eventually totaled at least $75 million, was terminated May 31 "due to cost overruns, schedule slippage, and sub-standard quality," according to a Sept. 4 internal military memo. But rather than fire the Pasadena, Calif.-based company for cause, the contract was halted for "the government's convenience."

The U.S. government is not going to fire Parsons for this disaster of a contract--no, it is going to halt this contract for "the government's convenience." This means that Parsons is not going to be blamed for the terrible work they did. If this type of shoddy work had occurred in a public works project--or even a private construction project--the contractor would have been fired on the spot, and perhaps even sued for damages. But in this Iraqi reconstruction project, Parsons gets a little slap on the wrist. But it gets better here:

Col. Michael Herman -- deputy commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Corps of Engineers, which was supposed to oversee the project -- said the Iraqi subcontractors hired by Parsons were being forced to fix the building problems as part of their warranty work, at no cost to taxpayers. He said four of the eight barracks have been repaired.

In other words, it wasn't Parsons' fault for this shoddy work--it was the Iraqi subcontractors' that Parsons hired who caused this disaster of a project. And now Parsons is forcing the subcontractors to fix the project at no cost to the taxpayers' cost--or Parsons' profits. Can it get any more worst that it is now?

How about this little conclusion:

The U.S. military initially agreed to take a Washington Post reporter on a tour of the facility Wednesday to examine the construction issues, but the trip was postponed Tuesday night. Federal investigators who visited the academy last week, though, expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the buildings and worries that fecal residue could cause a typhoid outbreak or other health crisis.

"They may have to demolish everything they built," said Robert DeShurley, a senior engineer with the inspector general's office. "The buildings are falling down as they sit."

Inside the inspector general's office in Baghdad on a recent blistering afternoon, several federal investigators expressed amazement that such construction blunders could be concentrated in one project. Even in Iraq, they said, failure on this magnitude is unusual. When asked how the problems at the police college compared with other projects they had inspected, the answers came swiftly.

"This is significant," said Jon E. Novak, a senior adviser in the office.

"It's catastrophic," DeShurley added.

Bowen said: "It's the worst."