Kickbacks, weapons and suicide: the US Army's battle with corruption

Kickbacks, weapons and suicide: the US Army's battle with corruption


The disappearance of 200,000 US-supplied weapons in Iraq exposes a massive web of corruption among military personnel and contractors.


On the lookout

Mar 15, 2008 Ed Blanche

Major Gloria D. Davis of the US Army was buried in Washington's Arlington Cemetery, the last resting place of many of America's military heroes, on December 23, 2006. But the 47-year-old Davis, of Missouri, an 18-year army veteran, did not perish fighting her country's enemies.

Instead, the US Army said, she died in "a non-combat-related incident" in Iraq. In fact, Gloria Davis put a bullet in her brain on December 12 in her quarters in the sprawling US military base at Baghdad International Airport. The previous day she had confessed to military investigators that she had taken $225,000 in bribes in 2004-05 from a US defense contractor that operated warehouses across Iraq where the US military stored automatic weapons and other equipment.

US authorities believe that the company that Major Davis identified, Lee Dynamics International, is part of a massive web of corruption involving military personnel and contractors across Iraq. She told army investigators she received the bribes through a Thai bank account and then deposited the money in US and Swiss accounts.

At the heart of an ever-widening investigation by a posse of US agencies is a mushrooming scandal in Iraq that has seriously eroded US credibility in the Middle East - the disappearance in 2004-05 of some 190,000 US-supplied weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and which the US Army cannot account for. There is evidence that some of the missing 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols, including Austrian-made 9mm Glock automatic pistols, ended up in the hands of anti-US insurgents and sectarian death squads that have killed thousands of Iraqis. The scandal over the weapons, and swelling evidence of massive corruption by US officials in the war zone, has reached into the upper echelons of the State Department, greatly embarrassing the Bush administration and underlining the chaotic and often inept US management of the conflict.
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