"It's all sunk costs," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi soldiers from 2003 to 2004. "It's money that we spent and we're not going to recoup."

There were 505 U.S. Military bases and outposts in Iraq at the height of operations, said Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for U.S. Forces in Iraq. Only 39 are still in U.S. hands -- but that includes each of the largest bases, meaning the most significant handovers are yet to come.

Those bases didn't come cheap. Construction costs exceeded $2.4 billion, according to an analysis of Pentagon annual reports by the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alone was responsible for $1.9 billion in base construction contracts between 2004 and 2010, a spokesman told HuffPost.

Rather than strip those bases clean and ship everything home, Defense Department officials tell The Huffington Post that over 2.4 million pieces of equipment worth a total of at least $250 million -- everything from tanks and trucks to office furniture and latrines -- have been given away to the Iraqi government in the past year, with the pace of transfers expected to increase dramatically in the coming months.

THE U.S. BASES

The most colossal relics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be the outsize military bases the Bush administration began erecting not long after the invasion, under the never explicitly stated assumption that Iraq would become the long-term staging area for U.S. forces in the region.

As a recent Congressional Research Service report noted, the Department of Defense "built up a far more extensive infrastructure than anticipated to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan."

The biggest push came in 2005, with over $1.2 billion in base-building contracts signed in that fiscal year alone, according to CRS.

"How did we come to be wasting that much money?" asked Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the progressive National Security Network. The answer, she said, is that dissenting voices weren't heeded when Bush administration officials were pushing their hugely overambitious agenda.

"The problem that is often cited in the run-up to the war continued afterward," she said. "The political and media elite weren't paying attention."

It wasn't until late in Bush's second term that "cooler heads prevailed," Hurlburt said, and it became apparent that there was no political will in either country for the U.S. to keep permanent bases in Iraq, and therefore no need to spend so much to build them.

But by then, the plans had already been set in motion. As Stars and Stripes reported last year, major construction continued even after November 2008, when then-President George W. Bush and Iraqi officials signed a security agreement calling for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

Most of the $2.4 billion was spent building about a dozen huge outposts that, in addition to containing air strips and massive fortifications also have all the comforts of home. The Al-Asad Airfield in Anbar province, for example, covers 25 square miles -- about the size of Boulder, Colo. -- and is known as "Camp Cupcake" due to its amenities.

The 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, as Whitney Terrell wrote earlier this year for Slate, is "home to three football-field-sized chow halls, a 25-meter swimming pool, a high dive, a football field, a softball field, two full-service gyms, a squash court, a movie theater, and the U.S. military's largest airfield in Iraq."

Despite the media's elegiac obituaries for these major bases -- like the prematurely named "Camp Victory", with its palace, its lake, and its giant, killer carp -- the fact is that not one major base has yet been evacuated.

And it's not clear just what the Iraqis will do with some of those bases, once they get them.

One U.S. officer whose unit turned over a military outpost in a Baghdad neighborhood to the Iraqi Army in 2009 told the Washington Post that Iraqi soldiers looted it within hours of the U.S. departure. "When we returned to the outpost the next morning, most of the beds had already been taken, wood walls and framing had been pulled and several air-conditioning units had been removed from the walls, leaving gaping holes," the officer told the Post. Weeks later, he added, the power generator the Americans had left behind was barely working.

One Iraqi entrepreneur indicated to NPR last year that there's a thriving black market in U.S. items. "The Americans turn over every base to the Iraqi army and police -- and they are all thieves," he said.

SO MUCH EQUIPMENT

Much of the U.S.'s most lethal and valuable military equipment is being shipped out of Iraq, in one of the military's biggest logistical efforts in history. Johnson, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, said that 1.5 million items have been removed in the past 12 months, with about 800,000 to go. "It's an enormous task, but we have no major concerns on our ability to meet the necessary timelines." Johnson wrote in an email to HuffPost.

But whenever a big army moves out, there's always a lot left behind -- what Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at the Council on Foreign Relations likens to an "iron mountain."

The Pentagon can legally transfer four different categories of equipment to the Iraqi government: "excess personal property," such as generators and mattresses, air conditioners and latrines; excess defense articles; sales from stock, including spare parts and ammunition; and non-excess military items deemed particularly useful for the Iraqi security forces.

Various Department of Defense officials provided not entirely consistent data on exactly how much has been given away thus far in each category. But the man in charge, Maj. Gen. Thomas Richardson, the chief logistics officer in Iraq, told reporters last month that U.S. forces had given away equipment with a fair market value of $247 million between Sept. 1, 2010, and August of this year -- on top of items worth $157 million that had been transferred before the withdrawal officially started.

The lion's share of donated items falls into the category of excess, non-military property. Major Kimbia Rey, a spokesperson for the U.S. forces in Iraq, told The Huffington Post this week that more than 2.4 million such items have been transferred to the government of Iraq since last September.

Richardson explained that much of that category consists of what they call "FOB in a box." When the Iraqis take over a Forward Operating Base, he said, they also get the things that go with it, such as containerized housing units, water and fuel tanks, air conditioning units, generators, refrigerators, porta-johns, beds and mattresses, office equipment, fences, dining facilities and so on.

According to Lt. Col Melinda F. Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman, some 12,490 excess defense items worth $70.5 million have been turned over to the Iraqis, with 7,000 more, worth about $40 million, to go. That category includes such things as older versions of weapons, vehicles, and body armor.

Finally, U.S. forces have also given the Iraqis 1,251 non-excess military items worth $47.7 million, Morgan said. That category includes such items as up-armored Humvees and 50-caliber machine guns, Richardson said.

All of the dollar figures are for what the military calls "fair market value"; the purchase price of those items could, of course, have been much higher.

And Morgan noted that the "heaviest volume of future property transfers" is expected to occur between September and December of this year, although the "quantity and value" of what is still to come has not yet been determined.

Indeed, a Government Accountability Office report issued earlier this month raised concerns that military officials will suddenly find a lot of equipment they didn't expect -- right at the last minute, just when everybody's leaving.

After one of the largest base transitions to date, the GAO reported, "officials said that they were surprised at the amount of unaccounted-for equipment that was left over at the end of the transition process." Senior military officials told the GAO they were particularly worried that unexpected or abandoned contractor equipment -- including expensive and much-in-demand materiel-handling equipment, like forklifts and pallet trucks -- would suddenly show up "likely at the last minute."

Some equipment has simply piled up in Iraq since combat operations began in 2003 and may not be properly logged, the GAO warned, pointing out, for example, that "units sometimes turn in such equipment without paperwork and have even removed identifying markings such as serial numbers to avoid retribution."

And while leaving the equipment in Iraq, especially if it's worn out or particularly bulky, is much cheaper and more expedient than shipping it home, there's no getting around the enormous expense of purchasing it in the first place -- and that some of it is precisely the kind of equipment that was in such desperately short supply when state National Guards tried to respond to domestic natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the Greensburg, Kansas, tornado in 2007.

Hurlburt's concern is not so much that the U.S. is giving away the bases and the equipment, but that all these things that so much money was spent on aren't necessarily going to do their new owners much good. "At least, you would like if we were leaving them there, they would be useful to Iraqis," she said.

And it's an awful lot of stuff. "I'm thinking about the size of what was wasted there, and thinking about how what we spent in Iraq was all borrowed," she said. "In a crazy way, what we left in Iraq was our good credit rating." - as reported by: www.huffingtonpost.com

During the rampage at Firebase Nunez, Ahmadi killed Specialist Marc Decoteau, a 19-year-old just a few weeks into his first tour of duty, and Capt. David Johnpaul Thompson, a veteran soldier and the father of two young girls. At close range, Ahmadi shot Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Russell, hitting him in the legs. Russell survived.

An alert Army sergeant ended the rampage when he drew his pistol and killed Ahmadi, a 23-year-old native of Afghanistan who had immigrated to the United States in 2009.

In their lawsuit, filed in federal court in North Carolina, Russell and the families of Decoteau and Thompson accuse Mission Essential Personnel, based in Columbus, Ohio, of negligence and breach of contract for failing to look into Ahmadi's background and not properly testing him to ensure he was psychologically sound before giving him a job.

Mission Essential Personnel, better known as MEP, was founded in 2004 and is the U.S. government's primary supplier of linguists, with more than 8,200 personnel in Afghanistan and a dozen other countries, according to the company's website. The company had $629 million in revenue last year, up from $6.7 million in 2005.

In a statement Monday, MEP called the incident at Nunez shocking and tragic and said Ahmadi's actions were "entirely unforeseeable."

Ahmadi "was thoroughly vetted for his deployment, including medical, psychological and counter-intelligence screening, and was approved by the U.S. government to deploy to Afghanistan," the statement said. Ahmadi "exhibited no signs of mental distress nor were there any other indications he might commit this criminal act," it added. The company also said the interpreter was under the operational control of the soldiers at Nunez and no one at the base ever raised any concerns to company managers about his performance or conduct.

The company said the military has consistently rated MEP's performance as outstanding. "The big picture is clear: MEP is a good company that has grown because of its good work and commitment to supporting the troops."

MEP's interpreters in Afghanistan were not authorized to carry weapons, the military said. Another MEP interpreter at Nunez had an AK-47 in his living quarters, violating the requirements of the contract, the lawsuit said.

"Knowing that an employee of Mission Essential Personnel, who was mismanaged, came up behind Marc in a dark hallway and shot him to death, took you back to square one in your sense of loss," said Nancy Decoteau, Marc Decoteau's mother, as she recalled reading the Army's investigation of the shootings completed several months after her son died. "That was not how Marc wanted to give his life."

The families said MEP's reaction to the shootings compounded their grief. No condolence letters. No one from the company attended either funeral. No apologies. "I would have been so much more receptive to them showing up at the funeral to say, `I'm sorry this happened,'" said Emily Thompson, David Johnpaul Thompson's widow.

The lawsuit seeks financial compensation from MEP, although it doesn't specify an amount. Judgments or settlements in wrongful death cases are difficult to predict, but can reach millions of dollars.

Mark Decoteau, Marc's father and a West Point graduate, said money isn't the objective. He said he wants to prevent tragedies for other military families.

"They're using taxpayer dollars and they are not upholding their end of the contract," he said of MEP. "They're not doing what they are supposed to do and we can't let that go on and have somebody else in our position. I just don't know what I would do if that happens again."

Even after the violence at Nunez, the Army increased MEP's contract to provide thousands of Dari and Pashto speakers by $1.2 billion as the demand for interpreters steadily increased.

Dari and Pashto are the two primary languages in Afghanistan. Without skilled linguists, U.S. forces would be unable to talk to the Afghans, gather critical intelligence or quickly translate intercepted Taliban radio traffic that could reveal plans for roadside bomb attacks or the locations of enemy leaders.

Most of the increase came in May 2010, weeks before the Army completed its investigation of the shootings at Nunez. Earlier this year, the contract was increased again by $525 million, pushing the total value to $1.98 billion, according to government documents.

Seeking to expand its choices, the Army announced last week that it had selected MEP and five other companies for a linguist services contract worth as much as $9.7 billion over the next five years. The companies will compete against each other to supply linguists for military operations around the world.

The violence at Nunez came as MEP was struggling to control its workforce in Afghanistan, according to confidential government reports written in 2009 and 2010 by U.S. officers in Afghanistan responsible for the day-to-day monitoring of MEP's handling of the contract. The records, obtained by The Associated Press, describe breakdowns in management and mirror the lawsuit's claim that Ahmadi and other MEP employees were not closely supervised.

The Army Intelligence and Security Command awarded MEP the contract in September 2007. According to the contract terms, MEP would recruit qualified linguists, ensure they were medically and psychologically fit, perform security reviews, get them to Afghanistan and manage them while they were there. Interpreters were expected to live and work in harsh and hostile environments.

The records show MEP didn't know where all of its interpreters were, what units they were assigned to and whether they were even showing up for work. "MEP's inability to track their linguists continues to be a problem," according to one of the military reports from late 2009. "Despite MEP's acknowledgment of this issue little has been done to correct the problem."

The trouble continued into 2010. "MEP's linguist accountability completely collapsed ... following months of deterioration," another military report said.

MEP told the AP that it provides daily reports to the military that track all its linguists on the ground, in transit and on leave. The company has never been informed by the military of any problems with linguist accountability, it said. -www.huffingtonpost.com