Bechtel donated $200,000 to the RNC during the 2000 campaign. It also has a long association with the Republican party and it’s board has featured such notable pubbies as Iran-Contra felon Cap Weinburger, Former Secretary of State, George Schulz and Reagan CIA head William Casey. Another former Reagan administration figure, W. Kenneth Davis is also a current board member.
In other words, Bechtel is a Republican crony corporation which was awarded a giant contract to help “rebuild” infrastructure in Iraq, including schools.
Now remember, this criticism is coming from the US Army, not from some liberal activist group or Arab newspaper. Bechtel took a huge amount of taxpayer money and then they subcontracted the actual work to Iraqi laborers who work for $2 to $7 dollars a day. The result is fucking shoddy work which are making the schools worse not better.
What’s going on here? What is Bechtel doing with my money if they’re not using it for what they were contracted for? Does Bush know about this? Does he care?
Come on, all you Bush apologists. Defend this fucking bullshit.
Having read a couple other articles(I’ll see if I can find cites in a bit) here is the picture as I understand it. Bechtel sub-contracted the work to some local firm. The local firm did a piss-poor job and dashed. Bechtel has no regional offices or people in the area who are able to do follow-ups on the work to verify if it was done well. Or if they have such offices, the resources were stretched too thin to inspect every/any site(s). So they kind of had to accept the subcontractors word for it. Interesting little tidbit, the word for “client” in Arabic is the same as the word for “sucker”.
So, Bechtel seems to have been suckered. It happens, subcontractors do crappy work and then the primary is on the hook for it. In the US the primary can sue the subcontractor for doing a shoddy job and they will have to fix it or pay to have it fixed. Now we may be starting to see what happened in Iraq. Bechtel not only can’t oversee the subcontractor pro-actively, because they don’t have enough regional resources, but they also have very little in the way of after-the-fact remedies available to them. We’re talking about a country where the lights are out a good bit of the time and they don’t even have a constitution. What, exactly, can Bechtel do when they get screwed over by a local contractor? Sue? Demand a refund? Demand they go out and fix it? And what if they refuse?
Enforcability of contracts is fairly low on the priority list for the already thinly-stretched CPA-I. This kind of stuff is going to happen, and will probably happen again. Giving contracts to firms with significant regional presence and with strong oversight may stop some of the abuses, but in general the rule of thumb is that without enforcability that you’re going to get screwed. In this case it was more than Bechtel which got screwed. I’d bet Bechtel has a clause in their contract with the US Gov which will penalize them for incidents like this. Even if you believe they got the job through cronyism, they’re the ones caught in the middle between essentially unaccountable local labor and the unhappy US govt. I don’t envy them. As a US firm the govt CAN, and quite probably will, hold them accountable for the sloppy work their local contractors did.
Bad, but fixable. The government should spend the money with Iraqi builders to the greatest extent possible, thus killing several birds with one stone: economic development, hearts and minds, Iraqi control, etc.
This political backscratching is really inappropriate when frigging lives are at stake.
I know the contracts my company(not naming names, but on the fortune 100 list) has with the Govt have clauses that allow them to kick our butts up and down the pipe if we don’t deliver on our end of the bargain. If we are late on a delivery date, thousands of dollars per day. If the service goes down, X per hour it is out of service. I don’t know if Bechtel’s contracts had clauses which spelled out these kinds of consequences for inadequate work, but they may well have. I’d guess Bechtel is between a rock and a hard place now because Uncle Sam is going to come knocking saying “Where are the re-built schools I paid you millions for?” and the local contractor is going to say to Bechtel “What are you gonna do, report me to Saddam?”
So now the whole thing is a morass. The sub-contractor is essentially unpunishable, Bechtel doesn’t have the regional manpower to do it themselves. I’d wager that you don’t want to imagine how hard a civil breech of contract lawsuit would be to prosecute against them or how much money you could get back out of them even if you win. Bechtel, on the other hand, is based in the US and they CAN be successfully sued/penalized for breach of contract. The US DOES have enough cops to come get the Bechtel folks and I feel sorry for what would happen to them if they tried to breech their contract with the Govt like their sub-contractors did with them.
Of course Iraq seems to be a special case for pretty much everything these days and I expect no real penalities will be extracted from Bechtel for this cock-up. The Admin will most likely decide that they acted in good faith and the blame lies in their sub-contractor(a reasonable determination). Unfortunately their sub-contractor, by way of the uncertainties of the legal framework in their country, is essentially unpunishable. Hopefully Bechtel, and other American-based companies who win reconstruction contracts, will learn from this lesson and staff up some regional experts to be able to oversee this type of work in the future. Ultimately it would be best if rule of law, not martial law, was re-established in Iraq and a sub-contractor who did this could have a license revoked or be made to pay penalties. Finding overseers is a problem too though. Regional experts seem few and far between, honest ones(resistant to corruption) are even harder to find.
No, I don’t think Bechtel is happy about this situation. Their rep with an important customer has been tarnished at the very least. If there are teeth in the contract, reasonably likely, they may be in for a rough ride. If they got the contract through cronyism(as DtC alleges) then it is hard to feel sympathy for them. They were in some sort of conspiracy to defraud their competitors of a fair shot at the contract, it is hard to feel much sympathy for them when their sub-contractor defrauds them. Karma yunno?
Take this with a grain of salt since it is a second or third hand report and I can’t vouch for its accuracy—according to people who have talked to a local man who is an NCO with a reserve component combat engineer battalion stationed at the Baghdad airport, the battalion has plenty of work to do but spends a fair amount of time sitting around waiting for private civilian contractors to do their work, redo their work so it is done right , fight with each other about who is going to do/redo the work and what work is to be done by the civilians and what work is to be done by the soldiers. In the mean time they are all catching random mortar shelling in the middle of the night.
In the meantime, I suppose that you have to expect some level of inefficiency, shoddy performance, and incompetence when ever you try to do big time civil engineering projects in a military district, especially when you are dealing with what seems to be a policy of turning all sorts of functions other than the actual dirty job of shooting, shelling and bombing people over to civilian contractors. I fully expect a major fraud and incompetence scandal before this thing is over. The situation invites fraud and incompetence.
For what its worth—at least the civilian contractors have not gotten a blow job from some White House intern. That is not to say that we are not all going to be corn holed by the White House before this thing is over.
Well gee, I think it is great. At least Bechtel is not screwing up jobs/work here in the U.S. with government contracts while they are screwing up jobs/work in Iraq… Oh, they are doing work on government contracts here in the U.S while also working in Iraq… Well, at least they have displaced lazy incompetent government workers (with lazy, incompetent contract workers)…Well, at least we are saving money…what, the contract work is costing more than the work previously done by lazy, incompetent government workers…Damn.
I can’t say I really like the idea of just shrugging and saying, “yeah, the subcontractors are for shit. What are you gonna do?”
Bechtel took a lot of government money to do this job. It is THEIR responsiblity to make sure it’s done correctly even if that means actually bringing their own people over there to do it themselves. I guess that would cut into their profits, though, huh? we can’t have THAT, can we?
If Bechtel can just slag off responsibility to the subcontractors then what the fuck service have they provided, exactly? i mean, fuck, the army could have just rounded up a few assholes off the street and paid them two bucks a day to slap some paint on some walls. How is Bechtel providing anything more valuable?
I don’t expect the government to use whatever “teeth” it might have in the contracts because that would mean bad publicity during the election cycle. Political considerations and good news propaganda from Iraq are going to be much more important to the White House than whether some raggedy-ass Iraqi kids have decent schools or a clean pot to piss in.
