Culture of Corruption: Army Officer Charged in Iraq Investigation

NYT

A United States Army officer was charged yesterday with smuggling hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen cash from Iraq and using some of it to buy machine guns, grenade launchers and other illegal arms that were later found in a garage in North Carolina. He is the third person to be arrested in a widening investigation by a special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The officer, Lt. Col. Michael Brian Wheeler, 47, of Amherst Junction, Wis., was a reservist called to active duty in Iraq, where he helped supervise millions of dollars in reconstruction projects from September 2003 until July 2004, according to a United States Army official and the affidavit describing the charges, unsealed in the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia. The money that was said to have been stolen and smuggled was intended for those reconstruction projects, including a library, a police academy and a center to promote democracy.

The affidavit hinted that others were likely to be charged in what officials say was an extensive bribery, kickback and smuggling scheme based in an office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Hilla, south of Baghdad. The authority was the American administrative apparatus that ran Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

Two weeks ago, Robert J. Stein Jr., a civilian occupation official, was charged with receiving as much as $200,000 a month in bribes from an American contractor, Philip H. Bloom, to steer construction contracts to companies controlled by Mr. Bloom, who was also charged with crimes.