by Dina Rasor, Robert Bauman
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Product Description
In this shocking exposé, two government fraud experts reveal how private contractors have put the lives of countless American soldiers on the line while damaging our strategic interests and our image abroad. From the shameful war profiteering of companies like Halliburton/KBR to the sinister influence that corporate lobbyists have on American foreign policy, Dina Rasor and Robert H. Bauman paint a disturbing picture. Here they give the inside story on troops forced to subsist on little food and contaminated water, on officers afraid to lodge complaints because of Halliburton's political clout, on millions of dollars in contractors' bogus claims that are funded by American taxpayers. Drawing on exclusive sources within government and the military, the authors show how money and power have conspired to undermine our fighting forces and threaten the security of our country.
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Betraying the Reader, 2007-11-26
The authors' thesis is that we (USA) should not be out-sourcing to the private sector critical military functions, primarily logistical. Some of the trigger-pulling has also been outsourced (e.g., Blackwater). I agree wholeheartedly with the authors' political position. But the major point is illustrated only anecdotically with a relatively small number of snafus in the current undeclared war (or battle for the peace, if you will) in Iraq. I do not mean to belittle the illustrations. Real people, true patriots, have lost real lives in tragic, preventable circumstances. Real people, real patriots (e.g., Rick Lambreth) have tried to expose the failures of the war service industry. The idea is that by outsourcing supply functions that should have been carried out by the military, the troops have been denied, at the private sector's (mostly Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton's) profit, adequate food, water and spare parts necessary to fight the war. I wouldn't call that betrayal of the troops. If true, that's betrayal of the nation. The difficulty is that the book treats a serious subject (only the future of our country, that's all) superficially. Thirty pages or so of material, maximum, a nice magazine article, has been blown into a 200 plus page book. (Beyond that, St. Martin's Press and Palgrave Macmillan, publishers, apparently out-sourced the proofing (to prove a point?) -- I cannot recall reading a book with more proofing errors, ever.) A quick book for a quick profit (heard of that before?). There have been other books about the same subject, and there will be more, and, I predict, much better ones.
P.S. I finished reading the book on a flight from Phoenix to Charlotte at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday, sitting next to a 19 year old Marine infantryman stationed in eastern North Carolina who said he was scheduled for his first tour to Iraq in April '08. On his trip west he said he'd walked along the freeway and through the neighborhoods seven miles or so from the Charlotte Greyhound station to the Charlotte airport at 2:00 a.m. in the rain. On our arrival in Charlotte, we gave him a ride back from the airport to the Greyhound terminal in downtown Charlotte to catch the bus back to his base. True story. I don't want to overplay this, but think about it. I have.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
questionable bias, 2007-11-07
I question Amazon's choice here to allow blogs of the authors' opinions to fill the space where independent book reviews normally appear.
And I question the authors' predisposition, evident in their search for and characterization of scandal, to distrust for-profit corporations for, of all things, earning a profit. Their writing style also is infused with a bias that americans-in-uniform are more capable and more efficient problem solvers than americans formerly in uniform and now working as professionals. The authors pose a false dichotomy: use troops or betray them. The reality is that, having downsized its military, the US has bigger policy questions: re-institute the draft, betray reserve forces by using them beyond their call-up periods, or not work overseas. The privatization of the US military began decades ago and was not invented by the Iraq conflict. The largest decrease in size of the US armed forces occured during the early 1990s, mostly during the Clinton administration, with American voters and Congress watching.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Tremendous reporting, 2007-10-24
I know from first-hand experience that it can be shockingly difficult to nail down the facts behind stories that took place in a war zone, even when the documentation is readily available and the participants are happy to discuss events. That Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman have been able to assemble the stories they have for "Betraying Our Troops" is almost amazing, considering the current environment surrounding the Iraq war. In an environment where government and corporate secrecy prevails, and where people resist speaking out for fear ruining their careers or becoming the targets of corporate, legal or government retaliation, just getting the stories on the record is an impressive feat. Were the stories included here simply unique anecdotes about scattered problems - contaminated water made worse by contractors, troops whose worn boots are duct-taped together because replacements are nowhere to be found, troops in the field living in squalor while others in the green zone enjoy flat-panel TVs and Xbox 360s, safe houses abandoned because contractors won't venture out to repair their generators - they would be infuriating. When these are put in the context of an armed forces supply framework that has no fiscal controls, and apparently no concern for the well-being of the troops it is supposed to serve, it is downright criminal. The contracting companies cited in this book - Kellogg Brown & Root, its parent Halliburton, Blackwater Security and the comically, tragically inept Custer Battles, among others - have two things in common: an almost gleeful eagerness to steal taxpayer's money through any means necessary (including the threat of a work stoppage), and a blatant disregard for human life, whether it's that of Iraqis, GIs or their own employees.
The book has a few flaws; tighter copy editing and a greater emphasis on the writing could have given the presentation more finesse. But the rough edges are more than made up for by the first-hand accounts of the effects of this disastrous logistics system. The whistleblowers who go on the record here have little more to gain than helping out those still stuck in Iraq suffering at the mercy of this hopelessly mangled supply system. This is the kind of book that usually comes out only after a war's end, when it is too late to do anything about the injustices described inside. The authors do a huge service by providing a nearly "real-time" look at a tragic situation exacerbated by greed, cronyism and simple callousness when there is still opportunity to address it.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Very scary, 2007-09-16
This book points up the need for a draft in the US. If we truly believe we are in a war, then let the whole country fight it. Just keep shopping is not my idea of sacrifice. A child in WWII, I was proud to participate in all the drives, use the stamps, buy war stamps; all the things even children did.
We keep lowering the bar for entry into our services so that we no longer have our finest in all too many cases. We could be accused of sending cannon fodder. We should not have to look to mercenaries to protect our interests. If we get out of Iraq, put in a draft, close the borders and ports, there would be no reason for such practices as outsourcing our military.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Should be entitled Blood Money 2, 2007-09-02
The book "Blood Money," one I reviewed for [...] some time ago, by T. Christian Miller, laid out some of the same items this book catalogs. Indeed, this book's authors quote Blood Money at least once. Indeed, they quote from an organization the hierarchy of which I met where I purchased "Blood Money" from its author. (That organization feels not only that the "war" was over a long time ago, but that it's about time that war become more privatized. That's a little oversimplified, but essentially that group's claim).
What are those items? Some other reviews have mentioned them: companies overcharging for their "services" to the US military, no DOD oversight, violence on Iraqi civilians done by many who couldn't even be prosecuted using the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And on and on. These authors, however, put these criminal activities into the context of, yes, betrayal of the troops.
Among the hardest dimensions of this "war" to deal with is that the conservatives--the same individuals who whine ad nauseum about government spending when they're not making any money off of it--are not FURIOUS at these criminal activities. The other is that those who insist we "support the troops"--with their bumper stickers, rhetoric, and votes--are clearly those most responsible for the troops' betrayal. And this book makes that just a tad clearer.
The book seems almost like a redundancy of Blood Money, but not really. It actually rubs in the facts listed in the former book--they are, alas, things we need to think about, and hold those responsible for them criminally accountable!
And the last chapter of this book was worth its weight in gold. The authors pointed out at a few points in the text that critics insist that the "war service industry," i.e., those outfits to which services to our military have been literally outsourced, is here to stay. But the authors challenge that based, for example, on whether those who're cheating us blind would be liable under UCMJ, and other criminal codes subject to, say, the Geneva Convention.
Read this, and Blood Money. Then ask yourself where your taxes are going and how are we going to hold these criminals accountable.
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