Posted by
Amanda Carpenter on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 9:21:29 AM
I was invited on
MSNBC's Dan Abrams show last night to talk about the military contractors in Iraq.
The State Department ordered a report, released Tuesday, that found that $1.2 billion paid to DynCorp could not be accounted for and there wasn't enough communication and oversight with contractors in general.
There's also a big problem because contractors aren't covered under military law or Iraqi civilian law. And, to throw some more problems into the mix, Henry Waxman and John Kerry are going after them for tax fraud.
So, there's a lot of stuff going on here.
I feel like this segment mixed two problems together: the missing money and the problem about contractors being covered under the law. This probably made things a little more confusing than it should have been for the viewer.
Through this I tried to make few key points:
1. Secretary Rice is the one who ordered the report and released the results so that's a step in the right direction.
2. Contractors play a critical role in Iraq and shouldn't be portrayed as trigger-happy killers.
3. Congress can solve the problem about putting them under military law. In fact, the House already overwhelmingly passed a bill to do this. To put this blame on Secretary Rice is wrong because she doesn't write or pass legislation.
The segment before mine was a package put together by Andrea Mitchell which suggested contractors were, as Abrams said in the introduction, "making their own rules of engagement."
So, this isn't the most friendly environment. But, hey, my spot went better than Marsha Blackburn's last week.
ENJOY.