Ex-State officials allege corruption cover up

Former State Department officials, appearing Monday at a hearing aimed at influencing Senate consideration of the Bush administration's pending request for supplemental war funds, excoriated the department for allowing rampant corruption in Iraqi ministries and failing to back an Iraqi official who tried to attack it.

"The Department of State's actual policies not only contradicted the anti-corruption mission but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government," said Arthur Brennan, a former New Hampshire state judge who served briefly as director of the State Department's Office of Accountability and Transparency at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

"The embassy effort against corruption, including its new centerpiece, the now defunct Office of Accountability and Transparency, was little more than 'window dressing,'" added Brennan, testifying at a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said the failure to attack corruption and an estimate that corruption has cost Iraq up to $18 billion since the U.S. invasion in 2003, much of it American money, will factor in the Senate Appropriations Committee's consideration Thursday of the administration's request for $108 billion in supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"As we are asked to appropriate money, what will happen to that money, in whose pocket will that money go?" Dorgan asked.

Monday's hearing was the second on Iraq held in recent weeks by the party committee. Dorgan denied the hearings were partisan. But with neither Republicans nor State Department officials in attendance at the hearing, one State official dismissed it as "political theater."

A department spokesman did not return calls in time for this article's publication.

Critics have suggested State has not pushed anticorruption efforts to avoid hurting relations with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Much of Monday's testimony was covered by a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in the fall. But that event lacked the emotional testimony of James Mattil, former chief of staff at OAT, and Brennan, a Republican who spent just 25 days in Iraq before leaving due to his wife's health problems.

"State has negligently, recklessly and sometimes intentionally misled the U.S. Congress, the American people and the people of Iraq," by publicly opposing Iraq corruption while privately letting it flourish, Brennan said.

Brennan said he sent a letter in July to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction detailing the nonactivity of Iraq's "Joint Anti-Corruption Committee," only to have the State Department withdraw the letter and exclude the reference to the committee.

Mattil testified that from 2006 to 2007, OAT's budget was slashed and its staff cut from 25 to six, without the any consultation with the office itself.

Brennan, Mattil as well as several senators said they were they perplexed and infuriated by the State Department's abandonment of Judge Radhi al Radhi, former head of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, who witnesses said brought more than 3,000 corruption cases. After the slaying of 31 of his employees and assassination attempts, Radhi sought asylum in the United States.

Brennan and Mattil said a senior State Department official had ordered agency employees not to give al Radhi references or contact him. Mattil said al Radhi and his family are now "destitute" and struggling to pay for an apartment in Virginia.

"This is about betrayal," said Dorgan. "We are going to ask the State Department what the hell they are thinking."