The U.S. Senate is placing increased emphasis on exposing corruption and profiteering in military contracting in Iraq.
Last week, Sen. James Webb (D-VA) introduced a bill with twenty co-sponsors that would establish a Commission on Wartime Contracting to investigate fraud and abuse in government contracts, including intelligence contracts, in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
“We are outsourcing this war in ways we’ve never seen,” said Sen. Webb. “Defrauding the government of millions of taxpayer dollars should not be considered ‘the cost of doing business’.”
There are now more contractors (180,000) than military personnel (156, 247) in Iraq, according to a July 18 news release from Sen. Webb. A list of companies contracted in support of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom does not exist, it said. Nor has information on how much the government is paying contractors been made available.
The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on “war profiteering,” the record of which has just been published. See “Combating War Profiteering: Are We Doing Enough to Investigate and Prosecute Contracting Fraud and Abuse in Iraq?,” March 20, 2007.
tudents in the 21st century need strong critical thinking skills like reasoning, questioning, and problem-solving, before they can meaningfully engage with more advanced domains like digital, data, or AI literacy.
When the U.S. government funds the establishment of a platform for testing hundreds of behavioral interventions on a large diverse population, we will start to better understand the interventions that will have an efficient and lasting impact on health behavior.
The grant comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) to investigate, alongside The British American Security Information Council (BASIC), the associated impact on nuclear stability.
We need to overhaul the standardized testing and score reporting system to be more accessible to all of the end users of standardized tests: educators, students, and their families.