Today’s Must Read

For all the allegations of fraud, waste and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, few U.S. individuals or companies have been hauled into court, placed under oath and forced to answer a lot of questions.

A story in today’s Washington Post offers some insight as to why not.

There’s a massive backlog of whistle-blower cases over at the Department of Justice. These are unique cases where regular citizen-whistleblowers are the plaintiffs (and share in the recovery when the cases are successful, which is supposed to encourage them come forward). The reason we don’t hear much about them is because they are automatically placed under seal. Filed under the Civil War-era False Claims Act, not even the people filing them can talk about them.

In theory, this allows the government to conduct an investigation without tipping off the target of that investigation. The government has the option of joining the plaintiff in the case. But that veil of secrecy can also allow the government to drag its feet on an investigation, which the Post points out.

Critics argue that the delays are at least partly the result of foot-dragging by Justice and the federal agencies whose position it represents, especially in the touchy area of suppliers that may have overbilled the government for equipment, food and other items used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Justice lawyers have rejected about 19 cases involving contractor fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, registering five settlements that resulted in $16 million, officials said. Government officials said this week that they are considering whether to dive into 32 more whistle-blower cases involving Iraq or the Middle East.

“It’s just flatly absurd for us to be five years into this war” with so few public cases, said Alan Grayson, a whistle-blower lawyer in Florida who has criticized the Justice effort and who is running for Congress as a Democrat.

There was an oddly written report from the BBC a few weeks ago that appeared to be reffering to these cases, known as “Qui Tam” cases.

One case that did become public a few years ago was the case of Custer Battles, when we heard about soldiers unloading trunks full of $100 bills from C-130 cargo planes with no sign of any accounting system.

Typically these whistleblower cases take two to four years to become public. But there are a lot of challenges to investigating a legal claim in a war zone.

Whistle-blower lawyers say other factors can contribute to long delays, including the difficulty in investigating claims in war-torn areas and complications that arise when military officials contend that technology or other products at issue in the lawsuits are classified. In addition, Justice lawyers who handle civil cases often cannot proceed until authorities decide whether a case merits criminal prosecution, the lawyers said.

In an interview with TPMmuckraker few weeks ago, Robert Bauman, a former Department of Defense criminal investigator who now works as a consultant to people who file whistleblower cases, said there’s a lot of cases still unresolved.

“They’re still in the mill,” Bauman said. “They will come out. I don’t know how long it will be, but eventually, they’ll come out.”