THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

This one in Iraq, You remember Iraq?

A huge American-financed wastewater treatment plant in the desert city of Falluja, which United States troops assaulted twice to root out insurgents in 2004, was supposed to be the centerpiece of an effort to rebuild Iraq, a country smashed by war and neglect, and bring Western standards of sanitation.

Instead, the project, which has tripled in cost from original plans to $100 million and has fallen about three years behind schedule, has become an example of the failed and often oversold program to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure with American dollars and skill.

But the triumph is not the inability to complete the project on time or on budget. The triumph is the system set up to prevent folks higher up learning about how big a failure the project was.

But Mr. Bowen’s investigators determined that senior officials at the embassy and the Army Corps knew of the problems for years without taking them to the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, or including them in any substantial way in the State Department’s so-called 2207 reports, which are supposed to inform Congress of the status of taxpayer-financed projects in Iraq.

In fact, when Mr. Crocker learned about the problems in July, he asked the investigators to determine why he had never been informed, the report says.

The investigators found that there were systemic barriers to reporting reconstruction failures up the chain of command, possibly helping to explain why senior embassy and military officials often praise projects that later turn out to be flawed or nonfunctional.

And, as if to remove any doubt that the carefully devised public image of the project bears only a passing resemblance to what the investigators observed, the Army Corps has repeatedly promoted the Falluja project as a remarkable success in its constant stream of news releases on Iraq reconstruction.

Lying and stonewalling, about the only things that trickled down in the Bushovik misrule.