

By DANA LIEBELSON

The U.S. wasted billions upon billions of dollars in Iraq on poor contracting practices, but very few insiders are willing to talk about it. Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren is an exception.

Van Buren served with the Foreign Service for over two decades and worked as a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) leader in Iraq. In September 2011, he released a book about his experiences, titled: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. After the book’s publication, the State Department suspended Van Buren’s security clearance indefinitely.

POGO interviewed Van Buren about the contracting waste he witnessed in Iraq, the mistakes the U.S. is still making in Afghanistan, and of course, whistleblower protections.

POGO: Can you give me some examples of the kind of waste and incompetence you witnessed?

PVB: I had one contractor…who hadn’t had a performance review in five years, but had stayed on, because there was no one else. I’m not just going to sit down and accept things when they are not right. So I decided to write a realistic evaluation. But the contract was renewed anyway against my advice, the reason being, he only had one negative evaluation—mine.

Another good example is our interpreters, who were largely employees of a subcontractor, an Alaskan Native-owned company. Most of the ‘terps’ were Iraqi-Americans recruited from the Detroit or Chicago areas. They tended to fall in two groups—they were so Americanized, they could speak only childhood Arabic, or they had very little English capability. They were fraudulently presented to the U.S. as skilled, but they weren’t.

Finally, there was the general problem that I wasn’t adequately contacted to see how projects were going. Take, for example, a meat factory the U.S. was supposed to be operating in Iraq. When we stopped by the factory, we found out that the contractor who’d taken ownership of it had sold it off almost immediately. The second guy who was supposed to run it couldn’t make any money, so he moved to Dubai. When we arrived, there were six Sunni families squatting in the factory. And we were still paying the security guard for the plant. He wasn’t there either.