there is no list

There is a very long letter to the Editor Utterly Cozy in Iraq in the Washington Post from Bill Allison of the Center for Public Integrity in reponse to an editorial by Steven Kelman. Our interest in the letter was the following comment:

Before this report, the center had gone to court only once in its 14-year history to force the government to comply with a FOIA request; the recalcitrance of the State Department and the Corps forced us to file two suits. After six months of trying, we are not confident that we have developed a definitive list of contracts awarded by the federal government for work in Afghanistan and Iraq. While researching the report, we found several instances of companies that touted their work for the U.S. government in one of those countries on their Web sites or in press releases, but which the government had not disclosed to us.

It is an enormous relief to us here at bpost to know it is not only us who have had difficulty in squaring up awarded contracts with official reports or announcements. The Center for Public Integrity has much greater resources than we do and yet, they came up against the same problem: there is no definitive list of contracts being maintained.

The important question is why?