Up to 20% of relief funds wasted

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By Brian Murphy and Pauline Jelinek

BAGHDAD (AP) | In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners.

It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.

"It's a bit of a monument in the desert right now because it's not going to be used as a prison," said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office released a whistleblowing report late last month detailing the litany of waste and fraud at the vacant detention center in Khan Bani Saad.

The pages also add another narrative to the wider probes into the billions lost so far on scrubbed or substandard projects in Iraq and one of the main contractors accused of failing to deliver, the Parsons construction group of Pasadena, Calif.

"This is $40 million invested in a project with very little return," Mr. Bowen told the Associated Press in Washington. "A couple of buildings are useful. Other than that, it's a failure."

In the pecking order of corruption in Iraq, the dead-end prison project at Khan Bani Saad is nowhere near the biggest or most tangled.

Mr. Bowen estimated that up to 20 percent "waste" - or more than $4 billion - from the $21 billion spent so far in the U.S.-bankrolled Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. It's just one piece of a recovery effort that swelled beyond $112 billion in U.S., Iraqi and international contributions.

But the empty prison compound - in the shadows of more than two dozen watchtowers now dotted by birds' nests - is an open sore for both American watchdogs and local Iraqi politicians who had counted on the prison as an economic boost.

The head of the municipal council in Khan Bani Saad, Sayyed Rasoul al-Husseini, called it "a big monster that's swallowed money and hopes" - including those for more than 1,200 new jobs.

He sometimes drives out to the site, near groves of date palms and a former Saddam-era military training camp about 12 miles northeast of Baghdad and just over the border in the tense Diyala province.