folo

One way you can tell we’ve had a change of government is that now the headline of NYT’s lede story reads Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers. Only in the last month, the story says, have investigators subpoenaed personal bank records and otherwise moved in on the two colonels — one Army, one Air Force — who oversaw the $125 billion U.S. program to rebuild Iraq.

It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.

Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.

Mr. Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where [Army] Colonel [Anthony B.] Bell and [USAF Lt.] Colonel [Ronald W.] Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Mr. Stoffel’s lawyer, John H. Quinn Jr. There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption. …

Apparently the investigation is finally moving up from midlevel people to those actually in charge of the ridiculously-ineffective but hugely-costly feint at “reconstruction” during a time when, as NYT describes it, “millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.”

“You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances.”

In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers.

In Major Cockerham’s private notebooks, Colonel Bell is identified as a possible recipient of an enormous bribe as recently as 2006, the two senior federal officials said. …

Finally we’ll hear more about Maj. Cockerham, the suicides (if that’s what they were) of Col. Ted Westhusing and Maj. Gloria Davis, and probably other names from the coverage I was foloing just before and after taking this blog public in early fall 2007.

For more, see BuckNakedPolitics‘s take on why the investigation needs to focus even higher. After all, thanks to BushCo’s and the Republican-led Congress’s “fiscal discipline,” Iraq and Afghanistan will by 2017 have cost us what the CBO projects to be $2.4 trillion.