Just in time for Christmas, UNICEF has released their preliminary findings from a report on the status of children in Iraq after nearly five years of warfare.

The findings are grim.

Two million children are threatened by disease, inadequate nutrition and inconsistent education. And making matters worse, children are frequently caught in the crossfire – literally.

“Iraqi children are paying far too high a price,” said Roger Wright, UNICEF’s Special Representative for Iraq. “While we have been providing as much assistance as possible, a new window of opportunity is opening, which should enable us to reach the most vulnerable with expanded, consistent support. We must act now.”

Among the problems highlighted in the report:

Only 28 per cent of Iraq’s 17 year olds sat their final exams in summer, and only 40 per cent of those sitting exams achieved a passing grade (in south and central Iraq).

Many of 220,000 displaced children of primary school age had their education interrupted, adding to the estimated 760,000 children (17 per cent) already out of primary school in 2006.

Children in remote and hard-to-reach areas were frequently cut off from health outreach services.

Only 20 per cent outside Baghdad had working sewerage in their community, and access to safe water remains a serious issue.

An average 25,000 children per month were displaced by violence or intimidation, their families seeking shelter in other parts of Iraq.

By the end of the year, approximately 75,000 children had resorted to living in camps or temporary shelters (25 per cent of those newly-displaced since the Samarra shrine bombing in February 2006).

Hundreds of children lost their lives or were injured by violence and many more had their main family wage-earner kidnapped or killed.

Approximately 1,350 children were detained by military and police authorities, many for alleged security violations.

And still, against all odds and that reality – UNICEF and other aid organizations managed to deliver critical assistance even though they struggled under the yoke of the lowest funding levels since 2003.

Health care was delivered and house-to-house immunization campaigns were waged, protecting four million children from polio, and three million more from measles, mumps  and   rubella.  Because of dedicated efforts like these, Iraq remains polio-free, and cases of measles dropped from over 9,000 in 2006 to just 156 in 2007.

Nearly five million children benefited from efforts to deliver educational services.  Materials and textbooks were supplied, schools were rebuilt and restored, classrooms were added to existing structures to accommodate displaced children who were forced to relocate to flee violence and ethnic strife.  (It is estimated that approximately 83% of Iraqi children of primary school age were in school in 2005-2006.  The numbers for 2007 are currently in the crunching process.)

Shi’ite children in a refugee camp near Najaf

UNICEF has been instrumental in providing sanitation, hygiene and most importantly – clean, potable water to as many as 500,000 internally displaced refugees.  Currently, at least 200,000 Iraqis only access to clean water is a UNICEF tankering project.  These  are the most desperate and destitute, living in  tent cities that have sprung up, populated with people who fled the violence but had no where to go.

As security improves, a clearer picture of the  needs of Iraqi children  will emerge, but UNICEF stresses that the challenges will be amplified by repatriating families, who will be some of the most vulnerable citizens in need of help.  Many have exhausted savings and are returning to homes that may or may not be standing, and if standing, they may be standing on an ethnic battleground.

To meet the coming challenges,  UNICEF and its partners are spearheading IMPACT: Iraq.  IMPACT: Iraq is an initiative that draws together  a network of NGOs and UN teams to rapidly assess and respond when families are vulnerable.  The intent is to facilitate local recovery, because strong families make strong communities.

To help seize the current opportunity, UNICEF calls for support to:

1. rapidly increase attention and action to meet the immediate needs of children and families inside Iraq – focusing on all vulnerable groups;

2. widen humanitarian access to Iraqi children and their families in conflict zones, behind security barriers and in detention centres; and

3. strengthen Iraq’s capacity and initiatives to improve governance and mobilize its own resources to invest in national recovery.

“Iraqi children are the foundation for their country’s recovery,” said UNICEF spokesman Wright. “Where children’s lives are protected and revived, community recovery will swiftly follow. We continue to owe them our very best in 2008 and beyond.”

Freshman Senator Bob Corker (R – Tennessee)  stunned more than a few folks with his relatively honest assessment of aWol’s acumen re: Iraq…

“I was in the White House a number of times to talk about the issue, and I may rankle some in the room saying this, but I was very underwhelmed with what discussions took place at the White House,” Corker said.

Bob – if you continue down this path, we are going to have to show you the secret handshake known only to members of the “Reality Based Community.”

Dear Eric,

My father, a World War II veteran, instilled in me an appreciation of our armed forces, and the young men and women who have done so much to protect the freedoms we cherish.  He taught me to appreciate the gravity of warfare, and that war should be pursued only when there are simply no alternatives available.

The Iraq conflict represents the unfortunate result when these principles are ignored, and I will continue to do everything in my power to force the President to change course.  But Congress must be equally vigilant to ensure that new flashpoints in the Middle East do not follow the same failed course as our Iraq policy.

In particular, I have been concerned with the Bush Administration’s provocative rhetoric on Iran, and I am using my seat in the United States Senate to remind the President that military action requires the express consent of Congress.  I have resisted efforts to provide what I would call “backdoor” approval for military action in that country.  Last month, the Senate considered an amendment that would categorize Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “foreign terrorist organization”.  To me, adoption of this amendment could essentially provide approval of military action against Iran, especially by this Administration.  I am also concerned that this amendment was debated without the benefit of a single hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which I am a member.

I voted against the amendment, and this month joined Senator Jim Webb and other Senate Democrats in a letter to President Bush stating, “We wish to emphasize that no congressional authority exists for unilateral military action
against Iran.” 

If Iraq has taught us anything, it is that we must be aggressive and vigilant in stopping President Bush and Vice President Cheney from dragging us into new military quagmires.  I will continue to do everything in my power to prevent this from happening.

Sincerely,

Senator Claire McCaskill

Take notice, fellow denizens of the blogosphere. She’s not equivocating or allowing Bush to frame the debate. Thanks, Claire.

Now if we can only get her to do the same on Mukasey, the FISA bill, etc…

UPDATE: Somehow I missed this: McCaskill will vote against Mukasey.

A 105mm M1 Abrams tank, outside the
Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM)
Detroit Arsenal, Warren, MI

On Monday, ten specially trained auditors, criminal investigators and acquisitions experts will descend on the Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) north of Detroit to begin an audit of a sampling of approximately 6000 contracts worth $2.8 billion issued by an Army office in Kuwait that has been identified as a hotbed of corruption.

The office in question, located at Camp Arifjan, buys supplies and gear to support American G.I.’s as they rotate in and out of Iraq.  Nearly two dozen Army, military and civilian employees have been charged with accepting bribes and kickbacks, and $15 million has changed hands.  Depending on what the investigators discover, the number of individuals charged will likely grow.  Currently the Army Criminal Investigations Command  has 83 ongoing corruption investigations relating to contract fraud.

The highest profile corruption case to be charged so far involves Army Maj. John Cockerham, who stands accused of bribery, conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction. Prosecutors charge that Cockerham, in concert with his wife and sister, took at least $9.6 million in bribes in 2004 and 2005 during the time he was a contract officer in Kuwait.

Some of the red flags that have been raised include contracts awarded to vendors outside the usual competitive bidding process and contracts that went through the motions of the bidding process, then were awarded to the highest rather than the lowest bids.  In other instances, what was purchased  was not what was delivered.

“Is there anything in there that might indicate to us that there might be some potential fraudulent activity?” Jeffrey Parsons, director of contracting at Army Materiel Command, said in an AP interview. “If there are patterns that we start to identify, then we’re going to do further review.”

Contracts with significant problems will be forwarded to the Army Audit Agency and the Army Criminal Investigation Command. If there’s credible evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI and prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department are called in.

In Warren, Mich., home to a large Army acquisition center, the contracting review team will examine 314 of the Kuwait contracts, each worth more than $25,000 and issued between 2003 and 2006.

In Kuwait, a separate team of 10 at Camp Arifjan is already going through 339 contracts of lesser value and awarded during the same time period, according to Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir, Va.

Both reviews are to be finished before the end of the year.

Preliminary results of an investigation into the contracts coming out of Camp Arifjan in 2007 has wrapped up, and the investigators uncovered numerous problems with the office, including high staff turnover, slip-shod record keeping, inadequate staffing, and lack of oversight.  Those personnel problems, coupled with billions of dollars of war funding,  create an environment where corruption, malfeasance and misconduct find fertile soil.

The investigative teams in both Michigan and Kuwait  will be reviewing paper records, but they will also be using data-mining techniques to search electronically stored data for signs of wrongdoing.  “Do we have contractors with different names but the same address?” Parsons said. “That would cause some suspicion.”  He also indicated that the investigators would be relying on tips provided by individuals familiar with the imperfect process.

If a contractor and an acquisitions officer conspire to break the rules for personal gain, uncovering the corruption can be extremely difficult.  “You can have a contract file that is pristine – all the documentation is there,” Parsons said. “Just going through the contract files doesn’t necessarily give you 100 percent assurance that something else might not have been going on.”

Beating the checks and balances in the federal procurement process is a difficult trick to pull off, requiring attention to detail and precise planning.  It takes someone schooled in the system to know how to evade it.  Unfortunately, the Army had some very smart “bad apples” who knew how to pull it off.

The 6000 contracts that came from the office in Kuwait spawned 18,000 transactions for myriad support items, from laundry and warehouse services to bottled water and food.  Every transaction presented an opportunity for fraud to be committed.

In 2005, two Lt. Generals who were top commanders in Iraq, Steven Whitcomb and John Vines, became so concerned about allegations of corruption that they pushed for the Criminal Investigation Command to establish field offices in Iraq and Kuwait.

The Army investigating the allegations of fraud, abuse, bribery, corruption and kickbacks is a good start, but it is time to take a page from history.  It is time for a reprise of the Truman Committee. 

In 1940, as World War II gripped the globe and United States involvement in the conflict became more and more likely, the United States appropriated $10 Billion in defense contracts in preparation for that eventuality.

Early in 1941, reports of malfeasance and abuses by the contractors reached Missouri Senator Harry S Truman, and the news did not sit well with WW I Infantry Captain “Give ’em Hell Harry.” In typical Truman fashion, he set out to seek the truth, not by summoning “experts” but by embarking on a 10,000 mile tour of military installations. On this fact-finding tour, he discovered that the companies that received the contracts were clustered in the east, with a mere handful divvying up most of the largesse. He also discovered that they were receiving a fixed-profit, regardless of performance.

He returned to the Senate convinced that the defense efforts of the United States were being undermined by waste and corruption, and he proposed the notion of a special Senate committee that would investigate the National Defense Program.

President Roosevelt was convinced to let Truman head up the committee, being sympathetic to the President and his administration. The President was assured that the committee would not be too much trouble, as it would only be allotted $15,000 to investigate billions in defense contracts.

The Truman Committee was created by unanimous Senate decree on 01 March 1941. Over the next three years, with Senator Truman at the helm, the committee held hundreds of hearings, traveled thousands of miles to conduct field inspections, and saved millions of dollars in cost over-runs. Senator Truman was not shy about threatening executives with prison time as he whacked greedy corporate snouts out of the public trough.

Before Claire McCaskill announced her Senate bid, I was encouraging her to run for the Class I seat that Truman once held, and touting her background as our state auditor and as a tough prosecutor as reasons she should run and reasons we should vote for her, because the Iraq fiasco needed a good auditing, in the spirit of Harry Truman.

During her campaign, she seized on my the idea of a modern day Truman Committee to investigate waste, fraud and corruption in the reconstruction of Iraq. During a speech in Harry S Truman’s hometown of Independence last year, she spoke admiringly of the former President and his diligence in reining in war profiteers. “He was fearless. He uncovered enormous undeserved profits. I believe we need a new Truman Committee. I will fight for such a committee.”

Less than a year after she was elected, and a mere nine months after taking her seat, she is very close to bringing the notion to fruition. The Senate recently agreed to a plan from Senators McCaskill and Webb to get a handle on the Pentagon’s scattershot method of awarding private contracts for work in Iraq. It was added to the Defense Authorization Bill for 2008.

The audits that get underway on Monday certainly underscore the need for the oversight body that would be created from the legislation offered by Webb and McCaskill.  In fact, they  demand it.

As frustrated as anti-war activists in Missouri have been with McCaskill for her unwillingness to defund the war, and as angry as progressives have been about her FISA vote, some on the left are tempted to proclaim that we might as well have Jim Talent still in office.

That’s not so.  She’ll vote with the Democrats on SCHIP and many another issue.  And she’s taking the lead in screaming and hollering about contracting abuses in Iraq. 

Given the fact the United States has more taxpayer-backed private contractors in Iraq than combat troops, given the fact that cost-plus arrangements allow contractors to gain a greater return the more tax dollars they spend on a project, given the fact that billions of U.S. dollars and thousands of U.S. weapons remain unaccounted for in the war zone, folks might consider this as low-lying fruit.

But someone needs to pick it. Sen. McCaskill, with a prosecutor’s zeal and an auditor’s precision, seems the right person at the right time.

In April, three months after taking the oath of office, the Missouri Democrat flayed military officials for awarding $200 million in performance bonuses to KBR, Inc., even though the company had consistently overcharged the government in carrying out its $20 billion contract.

“As an auditor, I’m stunned; as a senator, I’m sick to my stomach; and as an American, I’m angry,” she said at a Senate committee hearing.

Last week, she sheperded three amendments into the funding bill for Iraq that would require more oversight in the spending there.  Yes, that’s the funding bill that so many progressives want to see shredded.  She’s not doing what we want about a war that is bankrupting our treasury and exacerbating world tensions. 

Exerting some control over the madness that is Iraq spending is insufficient.  Then again, it isn’t nothing.

In business, banking and the rest of the world of private commerce, these provisions would be called common sense. In auditing, they might seem standard procedure.

In the world of military contracting, they appear as foreign as Mars dust.
………….

On the campaign trail, she promised to scream and holler about the abuses. The senator went to Washington as advertised.

On September 9, 2007 CBS News and the New York Times released a 1035 sample poll in which the interviews took place between September 4th and the 8th.

I was struck by this particular response:

33% of Americans think that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks on the United States, while 58% say he was not. These numbers haven’t changed much over the last two years.

WAS SADDAM PERSONALLY INVOLVED IN 9/11?

Now –  Yes 33% No 58%

9/2006 –  Yes 31% No 57%

10/2005 – Yes 33% No 55%

4/2003 –  Yes 53% No 38%

Still 33% after six years?

Where on earth did people get this stuff?

It could have been the marketing.

….That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told The New York Times in an unusually candid moment, “You don’t roll out a new product in August….”

Mixed messages, perhaps? Methinks dubya doth protest too much.

September 17, 2003

….Q Mr. President, Dr. Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld both said yesterday that they have seen no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11th. Yet, on Meet the Press, Sunday, the Vice President said Iraq was a geographic base for the terrorists and he also said, I don’t know, or we don’t know, when asked if there was any involvement. Your critics say that this is some effort — deliberate effort to blur the line and confuse people. How would you answer that?

THE PRESIDENT: We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. What the Vice President said was, is that he has been involved with al Qaeda. And al Zarqawi, al Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He’s the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. He’s a man who is still running loose, involved with the poisons network, involved with Ansar al-Islam. There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties….

September 15, 2006

….Q Mr. President, you have said throughout the war in Iraq and building up to the war in Iraq that there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi and al Qaeda. A Senate Intelligence Committee report a few weeks ago said there was no link, no relationship, and that the CIA knew this and issued a report last fall. And, yet, a month ago you were still saying there was a relationship. Why did you keep saying that? Why do you continue to say that? And do you still believe that?

THE PRESIDENT: The point I was making to Ken Herman’s question was that Saddam Hussein was a state sponsor of terror, and that Mr. Zarqawi was in Iraq. He had been wounded in Afghanistan, had come to Iraq for treatment. He had ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen in Jordan. I never said there was an operational relationship. I was making the point that Saddam Hussein had been declared a state sponsor of terror for a reason, and, therefore, he was dangerous.

The broader point I was saying — I was reminding people was why we removed Saddam Hussein from power. He was dangerous. I would hope people aren’t trying to rewrite the history of Saddam Hussein — all of a sudden, he becomes kind of a benevolent fellow. He’s a dangerous man. And one of the reasons he was declared a state sponsor of terror was because that’s what he was. He harbored terrorists; he paid for families of suicide bombers. Never have I said that Saddam Hussein gave orders to attack 9/11. What I did say was, after 9/11, when you see a threat, you’ve got to take it seriously. And I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein — as did Congress, as did the United Nations. I firmly believe the world is better off without Saddam in power, Martha.

Dave. He’s back.

Q Sorry, I’ve got to get disentangled —

THE PRESIDENT: Would you like me the go to somebody else here, until you — (laughter.)

Q Sorry.

THE PRESIDENT: But take your time, please. (Laughter.)….

December 9, 2001

….RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq. When you were last on this program, September 16, five days after the attack on our country, I asked you whether there was any evidence that Iraq was involved in the attack and you said no.

Since that time, a couple of articles have appeared which I want to get you to react to. The first: The Czech interior minister said today that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 terrorists attacks on the United States, just five months before the synchronized hijackings and mass killings were carried out.

And this from James Woolsey, former CIA director: “We know that at Salman Pak, in the southern edge of Baghdad, five different eye witnesses–three Iraqi defectors and two American U.N. inspectors–have said, and now there are aerial photographs to show it, a Boeing 707 that was used for training of hijackers, including non-Iraqi hijackers, trained very secretly to take over airplanes with knives.”

And we have photographs. As you can see that little white speck, and there it is.

RUSSERT: The plane on the ground in Iraq used to train non-Iraqi hijackers.

Do you still believe there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?

CHENEY: Well, what we now have that’s developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that’s been pretty well confirmed, that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don’t know at this point. But that’s clearly an avenue that we want to pursue….

Ooops, not in the run up to the war, eh?

I wonder where they heard all this stuff?

Program on International Policy Attitudes, October 2, 2003 [pdf]

….An analysis of those who were asked all of the key three perception questions does reveal a remarkable level of variation in the presence of misperceptions according to news source. Standing out in the analysis are Fox and NPR/PBS–but for opposite reasons. Fox was the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions. NPR/PBS are notable because their viewers and listeners consistently held fewer misperceptions than respondents who obtained their information from other news sources.

The table below shows this clearly. Listed are the breakouts of the sample according to the frequency of the three key misperceptions (i.e. the beliefs that evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda have been found, that WMD have been found in Iraq and that world public opinion approved of the US going to war with Iraq) and their primary news source. Fox News watchers were most likely to hold misperceptions-and were more than twice as likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.

The sad part? Viewers of CBS had almost the same tendencies towards misperception as viewers of the Faux News Channel.

There you have it, watching certain cable television networks will make you really stupid.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Stu Bykofsky, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News wrote a piece on August 9, 2007 titled “To save America, we need another 9/11”.

In it, he wrote:

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America….

….What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda….

The rest of his mindless pabulum can be paraphrased: “9/11! 9/11! Unity!…short attention spans…dismay…Clap Louder!”

Eh, what a maroon.

Colbert via Atrios:

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky wrote an editorial last month wrote a column entitled, “To save America, we need another 9/11.” He even suggested some targets for Al Qaeda, like the Golden Gate Bridge, Mt. Rushmore, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

Do not be so humble Mr. Bykofsky. You are clearly enough of a patriot that your house belongs on that list.

We are not worthy.

In running across this and this I stumbled across this [pdf].

Hillary Clinton sent a letter to dubya today:

September 12, 2007

The Honorable George W. Bush
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

As you prepare to address the nation tomorrow, I write to request that you seize the opportunity and offer the American people a candid assessment of the challenges that we continue to face in Iraq and offer a change in course to your failing strategy….

….What you are planning to tell the American people tommorrow night is that one year from now, there will be the same number of troops in Iraq as there were one year ago. Mr. President, that is simply too little too late, and unacceptable to this Congress, and too the American people who have made clear their strong desire to bring our troops home, and end this war. 

As Commander-in-Chief you have the authority and ability to greatly accelerate the redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq, and to bring so many more troops home so much faster. I strongly urge you to choose this course of action.

Mr. President, it has been nearly four and a half years since you landed on an aircraft carrier and stood before the American people under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” Do not repeat that mistake on Thursday night. Do not misrepresent the facts about the situation on the ground. And do not portray an unavoidable reduction in U.S. troops to pre-surge levels that would occur anyway as a marker of success. Be candid with the American people. They deserve it.

Thank you for your consideration

Sincerely,
s/Hillary Rodham Clinton

Well, dubya can’t help himself.

It is nice to know some people will be calling him on it.

Via Chris Hayes.

A columnist compares the Iraq War to a “dollar auction”, a standard tool that economics professors use to show seemingly rational thought processes leading to an irrational result.

Here’s how the dollar auction works: A person announces that they will auction off a dollar. The catch is that the second-highest bidder has to give the highest bidder the amount of their bid. For example, if the winning bid was 3 cents, and the second highest was 2 cents, the winner would gain $1.02 ($1 from the auction and 2 cents from his/her competitor.) In experiments, the bidding always escalates past the point where even the winner can expect to gain something. However, the bidding usually continues, as the rationale shifts to one of buffering losses with at least some meager returns, rather than actual gains.

Sound familiar?

Ike Skelton, who actually sponsored a withdrawal bill:

This is the fundamental dilemma we face in Iraq-our soldiers fight hard and they are showing some results, and we should take every opportunity we get to thank them for their sacrifices and work on behalf of our nation.  But their efforts do not seem to be matched by the government of Iraq.  When the President announced the surge, it was intended to improve security to create space for political progress.

By some measures, the heroic efforts of our troops have created some space.  But there has not been any great political progress.  We are left asking ourselves why we should expect this record to be different in the future and whether further American efforts will be of any effect.  It is not clear to me why we should continue to move ahead with this strategy at the cost of American lives and dollars if the Iraqis are not stepping forward.

Claire McCaskill (via PubDef):

But unfortunately, I don’t think there has been enough conversation yet about something other than the two extremes. I don’t think any of us in Washington want an expeditious drawdown of all our troops in Iraq. And on the other hand, I don’t think most people in American want us to continue to stand in the middle of a civil war. I think there is something in between. I will look forward in the hearing tomorrow, I will look forward to questioning General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, as I know many other senators will, about what would be in between.

I’m really freaking curious as to what sort of answers Senator McCaskill is going to get regarding this triangulation enlightened Middle Way she’s searching for. I’m even more curious to hear her answer Representative Skelton’s question – Why should we expect further American efforts to be effective? Why should we “continue to move ahead with this strategy at the cost of American lives and dollars if the Iraqis are not stepping forward[?]”

UPDATE: This isn’t about liberal vs. conservative. Note that Skelton is a conservative Democrat. Even conservative Republican Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones voted for withdrawal in March. 

Make sure you call McCaskill’s office and give her a piece of your mind (respectfully but firmly.) And call Skelton’s office and thank him for his representation.  Check below the fold for contact info.

McCaskill:

Cape Girardeau  573-651-0964
Columbia  573-442-7130
Kansas City  816-421-1639
Springfield  417-868-8745
St. Louis  314-367-1364
Washington, DC  202-224-6154

Skelton:

Blue Springs  816-228-4242
Jefferson City  573-635-3499
Lebanon  417-532-7964
Sedalia  660-826-2675
Washington, DC  202-225-2876