Sep 28, 2007
Weapons sent to Iraq poorly tracked
Richard Lardner, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - As President Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry clashed in late 2004 over the Iraq war, a rising Army star joined the debate.
Then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, head of a new command overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq's security forces, said headway was being made.
Tens of thousands of rifles, pistols, body armor, vehicles, and radios, along with millions of ammunition rounds, had been delivered to Iraqis over three months, he wrote in a commentary for The Washington Post six weeks before the election.
The weapons and countless pieces of other gear, paid for with tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars, were flowing, but not always to the right places or into the right hands. In the rush to arm Iraqis against a violent insurgency, U.S. military officials did not keep good records. About 190,000 weapons weren't fully accounted for, according to one audit.
The accounting failures are at the heart of a broad inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general, sharp questions from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and complaints from officials in Turkey who say pistols used in violent crimes in their country came from U.S.-funded stocks.
'Spartan conditions'
Peter Velz, a Pentagon official specializing in Iraq, said Petraeus' command was operating under "extremely difficult, Spartan conditions" and needed more personnel experienced in contracting and materiel management.
The training command had about 900 people in 2004, according to a command spokesman, and now has 1,100.
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Petraeus, now a four-star general and the top U.S. officer in Iraq. And there is no indication that he is the subject of any of the inspector general's inquiries. His commentary, however, is a reminder of how even cautiously optimistic assessments of the war can turn with time.
In June 2004, Petraeus took over the just-formed Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq, or MNSTC-I (min-sticky). The organization's job is to train Iraqi army and police units to operate on their own. Petraeus has likened the experience to "building an aircraft that was already in flight."
Given the rising strength of the insurgency at the time, Petraeus felt it was more important to get weapons and ammunition to troops in the fight "than to wait for a signature on a hand receipt," Army Col. Steven Boylan, Petraeus' top spokesman, said Tuesday by e-mail.
Petraeus left the post in September 2005. Since then, audits have cited the Iraq transition command for lack of oversight.
An audit in October by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction said there was "questionable accuracy" and "incomplete accountability" in the way MNSTC-I managed weapons. In one case, 751 assault rifles were purchased, but there is no record of their delivery to Iraq's ministries of defense and interior.
More recently, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said until December 2005, MNSTC-I had no centralized set of records for shipping weapons to Iraqi forces.
The command said 185,000 Russian-designed AK-47 rifles, 170,000 pistols, 215,000 sets of body armor, and 140,000 helmets had been issued to Iraq troops by September 2005, according to the July GAO report. But due to incomplete record-keeping, the command couldn't be certain whether the Iraqis received 110,000 of the rifles, or 80,000 of the pistols. More than half of the body armor and helmets couldn't be tracked.
"There clearly has been a lack of guidance to MNSTC-I on what accountability requirements apply to them," Velz said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week.
Blackwater probe
Federal investigators are also examining whether employees of Blackwater USA, one of the largest private security firms in Iraq, played a role in the loose arms problem by selling weapons on the black market that ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
Turkish officials have complained to the United States that they had seized weapons from the PKK, a Kurdish militant group, with markings matching those intended for Iraqi forces.
Blackwater has denied involvement in weapons smuggling and called the allegations "baseless."
Lawmakers who received a classified briefing from the inspector general last week expressed concern that U.S. troops might be injured or killed by firepower the United States purchased.
If "there is a wholesale movement of weapons that U.S. taxpayers have paid for into the hands of those who would do us harm or further destabilize the region, we must make resolving this problem one of our top priorities," Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said at the Sept. 20 House Armed Services hearing.
Thomas Gimble, the Pentagon's deputy inspector general, said his office has 90 open investigations stemming from nearly $6 billion in contracts for supplies and equipment needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
