While eating dinner at the Palace a few months back, someone told me that he was concerned that a US subcontractor may be paying bribes to a gang. The payments were essentially "protection" money to prevent the thugs from attacking a reconstruction site. These thugs were connected to the insurgency, which means the protection money probably helped finance the insurgency. Thus, US money was probably being channeled back toward killing Americans. Of course, I don't know the name of the company and this person would not talk about it on the record, so essentially all I heard was a rumor. All the same, this rumor seems very probable and troubling.