'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Professional "idealists" meeting reality

I've written a bit here before now (November 2003, January 2004) about the totally unproductive way in which North Carolina's Research Triangle Institute (RTI) approached the task of "building democracy" in Iraq-- based on its people's own faulty pre-war forecasts of the situation, some genuine (but extremely naive) idealism on the part of some employees, and the RTI leadership's keen desire to put their institute on the map and assure the continued payment of their own very comfortable salaries...

Now, North Carolina reporter Kevin Begos has done a good job reporting the total chaos into which the whole project collapsed. Including that:

RTI didn't start a single rapid-response grant in the second year of its $236 million government contract for democracy building in post-war Iraq.

Many of the problems stemmed from the rampant lack of security inside Iraq-- necessitating the purchase of $200,000 armored Mercedes cars for staff members, etc.

Begos quotes Wallace Rodgers, RTI's former team leader for the northern region of Iraq, as saying that:

he was working in the most stable region of RTI's work, yet by the time he left Iraq in October 2004, five of the Iraqi local governing-council members he had worked with had been assassinated.

But there were also, it seems clear, some very serious mismanagement problems. Begos also writes:

"There was all kinds of fraud I was coming across. It was rampant all over," said Dennis Moore, a certified public accountant from Massachusetts who while he was in Iraq reviewed scores of contracts for RTI.

"Of all the transactions I would go and check on, only one was free of problems," Moore said.

This Begos piece went up on the Winston-Salem Journal's website today. Thanks to Yankeedoodle for signaling it.

The site also had a companion piece from Begos in which a former founder of RTI and the dean of NC's congressional delegation both decried the secrecy surrounding RTI's performance under its democracy-building contract with the federal government.

In that one, Begos wrote:

All financial information about RTI's government contract was withheld by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, after a recent Freedom of Information request by the Winston-Salem Journal. The government agency said that the information was "sensitive and confidential commercial and financial information." RTI officials also have declined the Journal's requests to reveal salaries paid under the contract.

By the way, down near the bottom of the second piece is this interesting snippet about the Congressman concerned, Rep. Howard Coble (R):

Earlier this month, Coble, a staunch supporter of President Bush and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, created a stir by saying that "troop withdrawal ought to be an option (from Iraq). It ought to be placed on the table for consideration."

The bottom of the piece also reveals that public documents,

show that Victoria Haynes, RTI's chief executive officer, was paid a base salary of $367,500 in fiscal year 2003, not including benefits. Ron Johnson, the company's senior vice president for international development and head of the Iraq project, was paid $262,156.

These documents also reported that theformer founder of RTI who decried the secrecy, William Friday, was paid $500 for attendance at board of governors meetings.