Protecting the fraudulent

As usual, the Bush administration is protecting the guilty corporations from being sued:

ORLANDO, Fla. -- From his home office in a pink-painted mansion here, lawyer Alan Grayson is waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.

Mr. Grayson has filed dozens of lawsuits against Iraq contractors on behalf of corporate whistle-blowers. He won a huge victory last month when a federal jury in Virginia ordered a security firm called Custer Battles LLC to return $10 million in ill-gotten funds to the government. The ruling marked the first time an American firm was held responsible for financial improprieties in Iraq. But it also highlighted the limits of the broader efforts to stem contractor abuses there.

The False Claims Act that Mr. Grayson used in the Custer Battles case is a Civil War-era statute allowing whistle-blowers to sue contractors suspected of defrauding the government and then keep a chunk of any recovered money. There are an estimated 50 such cases pending against Iraq contractors, including large firms like Halliburton Co.'s Kellogg Brown and Root subsidiary. A technicality in the statute, however, has allowed the Bush administration to prevent the other lawsuits from moving forward. Cases filed under the statute are automatically sealed, which means that they can't proceed to trial -- or even be publicly disclosed -- until the administration makes a formal decision about whether to join them.

The law says such decisions are supposed to be made within 60 days, but with the exception of the Custer Battles case, which it declined to join, the administration has yet to take a position on any of the suits, some of which were filed more than two years ago. The law allows the Justice Department to ask for extensions, which are almost always granted, for as long as it sees fit. The department has kept the other False Claims Act cases from proceeding by repeatedly asking for extensions in each one.

That has left the cases in legal limbo, with lawyers like Mr. Grayson unable to bring them to trial or detail them publicly.

Contracting experts say previous administrations often declined to join in False Claims Act lawsuits but that the Bush administration's refusal to unseal the cases is unprecedented.

Something I read the other day was that one of the last acts of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to grant amnesty to many of the contractors in Iraq who were embezzling government funds. Heck, they might donate to the next political campaign.