And Stop Asking
Posted on | July 27, 2007
Since US reconstruction efforts are failing to provide reliable electric power to Baghdad residents, the Bush Administration’s reponse has been to discontinue status reports:
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only “an hour or two a day” of electricity. That’s down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.
But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly “status report” for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.
Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad who are scaling back efforts to estimate electricity consumption as they wind down U.S. involvement in rebuilding Iraq’s power grid…
The State Department’s new method shows that the national electricity supply is 4% lower than a year ago, according to the July 11 report.
The Bush answer to everything is to hide the evidence.
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