White House seeks to avoid oversight of Ukraine aid

Through The Libertarian Institute,

Joe Biden’s administration has come out to the opposition to Congress to create an office of inspector general to oversee arms transfers to the Ukrainian government.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes a provision that will create an inspector general for the proxy war in Ukraine modeled after the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction (CIGAR).

SIGAR John Sopko detailed for years the rampant American failures during the Afghan war. His quarterly reports routinely embarrassed US officials who tried to portray the situation in Afghanistan as improving.

You have a volcano warned that an inspector general officer for the war in Ukraine needed to be established to prevent a repeat of the situation that American aid created in Afghanistan, which saw massive corruption.

“There is an understandable desire in the midst of a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and worry about oversight later, but too often this creates more problems than it solves,” he wrote in a report presented to the Congress at the beginning of the year. “Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk of some equipment ending up on the black market or in the wrong hands is probably unavoidable.”

Sopko continued: “You are forced to get corrupt elements not only from the Ukrainian government or the host government, but also from US government contractors or other third-party contractors to try to steal the money. A lot of money goes into it and it’s hard to keep track of it.”

The White House argued that create an inspector general for Ukraine was unnecessary as the Department of Defense was already overseeing the transfers.

“This expansion is unnecessary and unprecedented, as inspectors general at the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development already provide oversight of US aid to a country’s people” , said a statement from the White House.

However, a report released in June by the Pentagon’s inspector general Found various problems with US arms shipments to Ukraine. “DoD personnel did not have the necessary accountability for the thousands of defense items they received and transferred to Jasionka, [Poland],” explained the report.

“We noted that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and were unable to confirm the quantities of defense items received with the amount of items shipped for three of the five shipments we observed.”

The United States has sent tens of billions in weapons to Ukraine since the Russian invasion last year. While Washington and Kiev maintain that all weapons are being used on the battlefield, governments in Europe, the Middle East and Africa report Ukrainian weapons have been used by criminals and militants.

Besides, US weapons were used by openly neo-Nazi fighters carrying out cross-border attacks inside the Russian mainland. Initially, US officials said they were “skeptical” of reports that the weapons used by these militias had been provided by the US. However, officials later admitted that, in fact, American weapons were used during the attack.