Marine underpaid

more than $1 trillion a year is paid in bribery globally-Mariam Mendoza Steinbuch, who was a staff sergeant deployed as a contracting specialist in 2006, was arraigned Tuesday in federal court in Washington. pleading guilty to accepting a $25,000 bribe in exchange for awarding numerous contracts to a Lebanon-based company at Camp Fallujah in Iraq. Court filings do not disclose the name of the company or the value of the contracts it was awarded in the scheme. Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world. Currently, the Pentagon and the State Department employ some 18,800 armed “private security contractors” in Iraq and another 23,700 in Afghanistan to protect convoys, diplomats and other personnel, and military bases and other facilities at a cost estimated to run into billions of dollars a year.

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