WAR PROFITEERING IN BUSH WORLD

Everyone I talk to about corrupt right-wing congressmen Jerry Lewis' and Randy "Duke" Cunningham's sweetheart deals with campaign contributors (and bribers) that saw the exchange of large amounts of cash for Pentagon contracts (greased thru by their House Defense Appropriations SubCommittee), wants to know if the materials sold to the military were faulty (everyone BUT the L.A. TIMES). Yesterday a Jacksonville paper, the Florida Times-Union, reported on a case that doesn't touch on the Cheney/Halliburton corruption or the Cunningham/MZM corruption, but is nonetheless noteworthy for what is bound to show up more and more as time goes by and more and more war-profiteering scams are uncovered.

In an article called "Bogus military suppliers sentenced," Paul Pinkham reports that "2 Florida men who bid on hundreds of military supply contracts were sentenced Monday to federal prison for providing the military with at least $4 million in fraudulent electronic parts -- many of which government officials said impeded U.S. troops at war in Iraq." The 2 criminals, Horace Christopher Daughtrey, 28, and George Searcy, 36, of St. Johns County had "pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the Department of Defense after discovering it doesn't check backgrounds and accepts bids online for supply contracts worth less than $100,000, prosecutors said. They admitted shipping thousands of non-working parts for various military equipment to the Defense Supply Center in Columbus, Ohio. When military officials discovered a problem with one of their shipments, Daughtrey and Searcy simply changed company names and kept bidding, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dale Campion said. The fraud interfered with military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where troops waited for components for broken equipment such as night-vision goggles and aircraft instruments, only to face further delays when the non-working parts arrived, said Thomas Goad a quality assurance specialist at the Columbus center."

This is only one of many Florida-based scam operations seeking to profiteer by cheating the military that is under investigation, according to the Defense Department. Of course this is small potatoes compared to what has been coming out of Halliburton, where BILLIONS of dollars are being ripped off by major GOP donors. Presumably at some point when DeLay and Jerry Lewis and other arch criminals are removed from power, Congressman Henry Waxman will be able to get on with the job of investigating the major war profiteers, and their political partners, are bringing them to Justice.