Author: Malini Wilkes

Passing around internet porn. Using illegal drugs. Accepting gifts from the oil companies.

Apparently, all that went on in the Lake Charles, Louisiana office of the federal Minerals Management Service between 2000 and 2008. And some of the workers involved were inspectors on offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

The long and troubling list of employee behavior is outlined in a new report from the Interior Department’s Inspector General. The IG released her findings early because of attention to the BP oil spill.

Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall says her greatest concern is the cozy relationships between federal inspectors and oil companies, and how easily inspectors move back and forth between industry and government.

For example, the report found one worker conducted four inspections on an oil company platform while he was actively negotiating for a job with that same company.

The investigation also found that oil companies invited inspectors to all kinds of events including “skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils and Christmas parties.” Investigators confirmed that inspectors attended many of these events.

There’s more.

Investigators found emails containing porn or links to porn sites. They found additional emails containing racist or sexist humor. Two workers admitted using illegal drugs.

Perhaps the most damning allegation was that some inspectors allowed oil company workers to fill out the federal inspection forms. The inspector general was not able to conclusively substantiate that tip from a confidential source.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar responded to the report in a statement, calling it “deeply disturbing” and “further evidence of the cozy relationship between some elements of MMS and the oil and gas industry.”

But Salazar was quick to defend his own record. Both he and the inspector general point out that the report covers ethical lapses before he became Interior Secretary.

Salazar notes that he implemented new ethics rules in 2009. He has asked the inspector general to expand her investigation to the period after 2009, looking into any possible failures to enforce standards at the Deepwater Horizon oil platform.

Some of the employees mentioned in the report have resigned, been fired or referred for prosecution. The rest are on administrative leave.

Several weeks after the BP oil spill Salazar announced that he would break up the Minerals Management Service, reorganizing it into three separate bureaus.

(Fox’s Kristin Brown contributed to this report.)

As the U.S. military plans a rapid troop drawdown in Iraq this summer, commanders have to decide where they’re needed most and where they should stay the longest.

The U.S. has promised to decrease troop levels from roughly 95,000 now to 50,000 by the end of August.  But the military won’t draw down by a certain percentage across the board.  The level of violence varies from city to city and province to province, so commanders have to make some tough calls on where to place its manpower.

I recently spent some time traveling through northern Iraq and found that security is indeed a mixed bag.

In Ninewa province, near the city of Mosul, the U.S. will likely have a strong presence for some time to come.  Arab-Kurd tensions remain high, and Al-Qaeda is still trying to exploit that.

To ease the tensions, the U.S. military recently began three-party combined checkpoints and patrols across the area.  Kurdish peshmerga work side by side with the mostly Arab Iraqi forces and U.S. troops.   Commanders say the Americans are playing the role of an “honest broker” between Kurds and Arabs, helping their security forces to accept each other.  At first, the joint patrols seemed a radical idea for this region.   Lt. Col. Mohammad Khalaf of the Iraqi police says, “In the beginning some people resisted this idea.  This is a very sensitive area.  But the American troops are a calming force.”

South of Mosul, the city of Samarra has a much different dynamic.  The U.S. military is already almost gone.  Just a few dozen soldiers remain at a small outpost on the edge of town, where they work with Iraqi forces.

Samarra was once a flashpoint for violence.  In 2006, insurgents bombed its Golden Mosque, one of the Shiites holiest shrines, triggering nearly two years of bloody sectarian violence.  U.S. and Iraqi forces came in, clearing the city block by block.

But today, the Americans really venture into the town center.  They think they’re a distraction now.  So we toured the city escorted by Iraqi police.  Our Fox crew rode in the back of a pickup truck with no body armor and cameras rolling.  It would have been foolish two years ago.  But the insurgents seem to be gone now.  General Ghayath Sami of the Iraqi Army says, “The radical ideas are disappearing.  The sectarian way of thinking is ending now.”

As workers reconstruct the Golden Mosque, thousands of Shiite pilgrims peacefully visit this mostly Sunni city every week.  A tour group from Taiwan recently came to sightsee.

The blast walls are coming down, businesses are re-opening, and city leaders hope to rebuild restaurants and hotels to attract both religious and cultural tourism.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has to decide how soon its safe to back out completely, from each village and city and province.

A U.S. soldier looks out from a tower at the massive Bayji oil refinery in northern Iraq.

The Bayji oil refinery in northern Iraq reflects a mix of forces that define Iraq:  oil and politics, terrorism and corruption.

Bayji produces 70 percent of the country’s refined fuel including gasoline, kerosene and diesel oil.  But millions of dollars of fuel has disappeared over the years, ending up in the hands of terrorists.

Two years ago Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups were a constant threat, intimidating truck drivers as they filled up at Bayji’s fuel distribution points and stealing the fuel at gunpoint.  Inside the compound, corruption was rampant.

“Two or three years ago we had here, maybe the biggest corruption in Iraq,” says refinery director Ali Al-Obaidi.

He arrived in 2007 as part of a joint U.S.-Iraqi corruption crisis team.  The U.S. military set up a  base on the refinery grounds.  Obaidi  began cleaning house.  He fired corrupt workers and started carefully checking documents.  At the distribution points, he added a fuel metering system to monitor the payload for every truck leaving the refinery.

But his team can’t control what happens once the tankers pull out.  The corruption has now moved beyond the refinery gates and into the trucking system.

Col. Adel Faiz, chief of the refinery’s oil protection force says the drivers now “change the document.  They change the stamp.  They play with the destination of the tankers.”

The refinery team would prefer to move fuel through pipelines, but they say they’re meeting resistance from politicians in Baghdad in bed with the trucking companies

Col. Adel and Dr. Obaidi say that fighting corruption has made them some powerful enemies in the oil ministry.  Both men have had warrants issued for their arrest.

Obaidi credits a small but visible U.S. military presence for keeping his political enemies off his back.  “Just their presence here,” he says, “can neutralize this type of pressure, and I feel more stronger.”

All U.S. troops are supposed to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. But the refinery management would like to see the Americans stick around longer.  They guarantee more security and less corruption– the keys to attracting foreign investors and building Bayji’s future.

America’s giant General gets visibly emotional when he talks about the sacrifices made by U.S. troops in Iraq.

Last week, Fox News spent a full day with Gen. Ray Odierno, following the top U.S. commander in Iraq from his morning briefings at Camp Victory through a visit to a base near Kirkuk to an evening meeting with the U.S. ambassador.

Odierno was clearly most passionate when talking about his belief in the young men and women serving today.   He calls today’s military a “hell of a generation of young people,” and nearly teared up when praising their commitment and dedication.
The 6’5” general sat down with us to discuss Iraq’s national elections, and the plan to rapidly drawdown U.S. troops later this summer.

He also looked back on the surge—the buildup of 20,000 U.S. troops here in 2007.  Odierno was a leading advocate of the strategy at a time when Americans were already dying by the dozens every month.  He says it was a “terrible burden” as the U.S. death toll continued rising in the early months of the surge, but says he always believed the strategy would work.

Much more from the General below— from his thoughts on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to the last movie he saw, to the last time he cried.

Iraq’s three-week campaign season is over.

In the U.S., campaigns run a lot longer than that, with candidates using expensive advertising firms and pollsters to get their message out. In Iraq, it’s more old-school: fliers, posters, rallies — and sometimes the threat of violence.

Driving through the streets of Baghdad, you notice thousands of posters plastered all over. We’ve even seen them stuck to palm trees in nearby villages. They’re the most visible sign of a fierce competition for voter recognition. We’ve also seen candidates and volunteer supporters out in the neighborhoods handing out fliers.

But we’ve heard reports that some of those fliers are warning voters to stay away from the polls. Fear, intimidation and sectarianism are still a part of Iraqi life.

Over the course of the last few months, several candidates have been assassinated and some party offices have been bombed.

The U.N. says it’s concerned about the attacks, but so far there’s been no widespread sectarian violence.

Iraq has no campaign finance laws. So we’ve heard many, many reports of vote-buying and gift-giving. Candidates allegedly are offering blankets, heaters, cell phone cards and even chickens — all in exchange for votes.

Large rallies have been limited in number, as any gathering is still considered a target for violence. That’s why many candidates have turned to the airwaves. TV channels are saturated with campaign ads and some candidates are starting to try out new media like text messaging and Facebook.

Voters’ concerns will sound remarkably familiar: Many Iraqis tell us that the government has failed to deliver on basic services, jobs and security. Many express the opinion that all politicians are liars.

The candidates’ ads and speeches might also sound familiar to an American audience; their main message? You can trust me.