Editorial: Big ‘documents problem’

Friday, Oct. 26, 2007 | 7:28 a.m.

So many billions of dollars, and so many weapons and supplies, have turned up missing in Iraq since 2003 that the Pentagon sent a special team of auditors and investigators there last month for an indefinite stay.

The scandal raises this question: How much of the $600 billion that we have committed to Iraq has been stolen, wasted or used against us?

The latest outrageous example involves DynCorp International, a Virginia-based company best known for its contracts to provide security for visiting officials and diplomats in Iraq.

In late 2003 and early 2004, the company secured $1.2 billion worth of State Department contracts to train Iraqi police officers, relieving U.S. military units of that responsibility.

Almost predictably, no one can account for most of that money. The State Department, according to a story Wednesday in The New York Times, spends $4 billion a year on private contracts for law enforcement and security, but employs only 17 people to oversee how the money is spent.

Stuart Bowen, whose position - special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction - was created by Congress three years ago, reported Monday that DynCorp's records on its training contracts are in disarray.

"As a result, (the State Department) does not know specifically what it received for most of the $1.2 billion in expenditures under its DynCorp contract for the Iraqi Police Training Program," Bowen wrote.

A DynCorp spokesman told the Times there was no intentional misbilling. "It could be just a documents problem," he said.

The outrage here is twofold. The Bush administration never planned for an insurgency, forcing the State Department and the Pentagon to react spontaneously when the violence began. Training police officers in a country whose government has just been toppled is a priority that should not have been left to after the fact.

Second, even if created as an afterthought, a privatized training program with almost unlimited resources should have been overseen well enough to put competent police officers on the streets in time to quell or contain the insurgency - and save thousands of lives in the process.