Our guest blogger is Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee held the 19th in its series of hearings on waste, fraud and corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday. What we heard was really stunning.

We learned that the Army’s biggest contractor in Iraq, KBR, received bonuses totaling $83.4 million for work done during 2007 under LOGCAP III Task Order 139, which included electrical wiring work throughout Iraq. According to the Army’s own criteria for performance bonuses, in order to properly receive such a bonus, the firm’s work was to have been “excellent.”

Witnesses told our committee KBR’s work was far from excellent. As they described it, it sounds more like a disaster:

– One witness was Eric Peters, a former KBR Master Electrician who worked in Iraq for KBR as recently as this year. He said he quit the company after determining that KBR was incapable of doing the electrical wiring work properly, did not care about the safety of its own employees, and sought to intimidate those who spoke up. Peters also noted that KBR hires third country nationals who are not electricians to do wiring work. Often, workers and supervisors don’t even speak the same language.

– Another witness was Jim Childs, also a Master Electrician. The Army hired him to inspect KBR’s wiring work in Iraq after I asked the Army to take a closer look at what KBR was doing. He told us KBR’s electrical wiring work in Iraq was the “most hazardous, worst quality work I have ever inspected. During my theatre-wide inspections, I concluded that roughly 90 percent of the new construction building work by KBR was not properly wired. This means that over 70,000 buildings in Iraq were not up to code.”

– Our third witness was the former Army contract manager who previously managed KBR’s LOGCAP III contract. He told us the $83.4 million bonus received by KBR was “highly inappropriate” and if he had not been forced out of his position managing that contract – after he refused to rubber stamp nearly a billion dollars in questionable KBR charges – he would have objected to awarding the bonus.

The sad story of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret, really tells it all. He was electrocuted as he showered in a shower stall on a U.S. military base. His mother was told he was electrocuted because he carried an electrical appliance into the shower. She refused to accept that explanation and forced an investigation which determined that the real cause of Sgt. Maseth’s electrocution was faulty electrical wiring.

Did KBR move quickly to correct the wiring? Not according to Jim Childs, who told us that a full 10 months after Sgt. Maseth’s electrocution death, KBR still had not fixed the wiring problems to make the shower safe.

I intend to continue to pursue this issue. I want to know why KBR got these bonuses and who approved them. I also want to know what the Pentagon is doing to hold KBR accountable for its work in Iraq. Tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for slipshod, deadly wiring work sure isn’t holding anybody accountable for anything.

I intend to keep asking these questions, and more, until I get satisfactory answers. American taxpayers and American soldiers, who put their lives on the line, deserve no less.

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The New York Times is at it again. Reaching back into an old bag of tricks, Bush administration holdovers in the Pentagon have used the paper of record to spread false propaganda at a critical juncture in a key national security debate, this time about released Guantanamo detainees supposedly returning to terrorism. This article has just one purpose: to mislead readers about the true nature of the threat posed by released Guantanamo detainees.

Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller discards any semblance of journalism and merely serves as a conduit for unnamed Pentagon officials to claim without any supporting evidence that 74 released Guantanamo detainees are “engaged in terrorism.” The headline screams “1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds,” and the entire opening of the story presents the Pentagon figures as conclusions of fact that are being withheld for political purposes.

Not until the 17th paragraph does this key passage appear:

The Pentagon has provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided.

Got that? Bumiller admits that “only a few” can be independently verified, more than half aren’t even identified, and no details are provided about the specific accusations but not until almost the end of the story.

We know previous Pentagon efforts to link released detainees with terrorism have included those who have written op-eds or participated in films about their experience at Guantanamo as “returning to the fight.” What kind of journalism allows a reporter to write a story so clearly slanted in one direction without even a minimal effort to verify the information that forms its basis?

An accurate story using this same information would report that some Guantanamo detainees have engaged in terrorism upon release, but that most of the allegations of such activity remain unconfirmed and that previous Pentagon reports have included activity that is not normally associated with terrorism. It wouldn’t make for such a sensational headline, but it would be much more representative of the truth.