I received this mass-email today from Alan Grayson. Within this email you will find numbers that are staggering, numbers that make a compelling argument that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is utterly immoral:

Dear Erich: Yesterday, the Commission on Wartime Contracting released itsfinal report. The Commission reported that between $31 billion and $62 billion of the tax money spent on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted.  It also said that between $10 billion and $19 billion of what contractors billed and received was fraudulent.  In fact, $360 million of our tax dollars went straight to . . . the Taliban. Wow.  Who could have imagined that? Well . . . me. When I saw that the Bush Administration was doing nothing about fraud in Iraq, I revived a law going back to the Civil War that allowed whistleblowers to bring lawsuits in the name of the U.S. Government.  I filed case after case, which were promptly greeted by the Bush Administration with gag orders – gag orders that they kept in place for years.  They didn’t want any more bad news coming out of Iraq. So I went on CNN, spoke to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and told America whatever I could say without violating those gag orders.  And when the Bush Administration finally let one case out from under those gag orders – and declined to prosecute it – I took that case to trial, and won a $14 million judgment.  It was the third-largest judgment for whistleblowers in the 143-year history of that law. Those contractors built bases without hooking up the plumbing.  A general testified that when he went there, he felt like throwing up. The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page article that I was “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” The national organization Taxpayers Against Fraud named me “Lawyer of the Year.”  And people started to think, “what is going on over there?” [More . . . ]