IRAQ: A US-run project to rebuild the Baghdad Police College has been grossly mismanaged, writes Amit Paley in Baghdad
A $75 million (€59 million) project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be demolished, US federal investigators have found.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to US efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that faeces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was called "the rain forest".
"This is the most important civil security project in the country - and it's a failure," said Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by the US Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."
Federal investigators said the inspector general's findings raise serious questions about whether the US army corps of engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the college or reconstruction programmes across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 per cent of total project costs. The corps of engineers said this week it had initiated an investigation into the academy project.
The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corporation, the American construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion (€0.78 billion) for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous failures by Parsons to build health clinics, prisons and hospitals properly, Mr Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parson project.
A spokeswoman for Parsons said the company had not seen the inspector general's report.
The Coalition Provisional Authority hired Parsons in 2004 to transform the college into a modern 650-acre facility whose training capacity would expand from 1,500 recruits to at least 4,000. However, complaints poured in two weeks after the recruits moved in at the end of May. "They may have to demolish everything they built," said Robert DeShurley, a senior engineer with the inspector general's office. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)