War & Disaster Profiteering

Franklin Willis, a former official with the Coalition Provision Authority, told the Senate Democratic Policy Commmittee that after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was "like the Wild West -- awash in $100 bills." One contractor, Custer Battles, was paid with $2 million in fresh U.S. bills, stuffed into a gunnysack, he said. Read More

A U.S. State Department official said that Washington had earmarked $35 million to recruit and train a new army in Liberia and Dyncorp was ready to start the project within the next few weeks. Read More

just two weeks after an audit by the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction found inadequate oversight of unauthorized contracts and a loss of $9 billion in Iraqi funds, a witness told Democrats on Capitol Hill said key decisions by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq enabled contractors to bilk billions in reconstruction funds. Read More

There are new allegations that heavily armed private security contractors in Iraq are brutalizing Iraqi civilians. In an exclusive interview, four former security contractors told NBC News that they watched as innocent Iraqi civilians were fired upon, and one crushed by a truck. The contractors worked for an American company paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Army is looking into the allegations. Read More

The U.S. government hired South-African mercenaries as bodyguards and police trainers. The contract later proved embarrassing when two of the former bodyguards were arrested in Zimbabwe on charges of plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Read More

America and its key ally Saudi Arabia are being accused of quietly seeking to muzzle al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news station that has often incurred Washington's ire for its coverage of Iraq and President George Bush's "war on terror". Read More

U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says. Read More

Former associates say Ryan Manelick had told Army investigators looking into a fellow contractor's disappearance that large sums of money were being paid in kickbacks to a U.S. Army officer in Iraq in return for doling out lucrative contracts. Two months later Ryan Manelick was shot dead. Read More

The Army Corps has set aside as much as $1.47 billion for explosives-demolition contracts with 10 private companies. Neither Zapata Engineering nor the Army Corps of Engineers would reveal exact salaries, but the first one-year contract the company received in September 2003 totaled $3.8 million for five management positions in Iraq. Read More

Despite extensive media coverage of the kidnappings, beheadings and suicide attacks on civilian workers, one in ten applicants for jobs with the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, remain willing to take those well-paying truck driver, food service, laundry and maintenance positions in Iraq. Read More