"The connections burst ... and the sewage thus leaked from the bathroom down through the building and into light fixtures and through the ceilings."

How much American money has been squandered building things like this in Iraq?

A series of investigations, led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq Reconstruction, has found the reconstruction effort are riddled with waste, fraud, corruption, and shoddy construction. Bowen told NPR's All Things Considered about one particularly bad construction site he investigated — a $75 million dollar police training academy, built by Parsons [Corporation, a California company that had $1 billion in construction contracts].

"Essentially when they put in the plumbing, they had no fittings, so they just joined plumbing pipes, cemented them together," he said. "The connections burst once they started to be used and the sewage thus leaked from the bathroom down through the building and into light fixtures and through the ceilings."

Plumbing without fittings in a $75 million building that is flowed with sewage, into the light fixtures and through the ceilings.