Iraq's Missing Billions

I know this is a day late and a dollar short, but it's still good. Read on.

When King Jerk-Off Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq he had 23 billion dollars at his disposal for rebuilding Iraq. All these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and for whatever reason 14 billion of this amount was converted into cash in the form of 363 tons of shrink wrapped $100 bills and flown into Iraq. This and approximately 6 billion additional dollars were spent over the course of 14 months, with a staggering 2.6 billion spend in the last 6 weeks of U.S. occupation.

Why was it converted into cash? As has been said, cash is hard to trace, and hard to account for, so that's why most of the dirty deals in the world are transacted with cash. In post-war Iraq, there were a lot of dirty deals to be done.

And, why were we spending that money again? Oh yeah, cause a few months before, After the U.S. launched a war on Iraq, to destroy weapons of mass destruction, with trumped up evidence and spent over 100 billion dollars to destroy Iraq in three weeks.

At the time it didn't make sense to me. Why spend billions to destroy the countries infrastructure, then three weeks, spend billions to rebuild it? Why not just drop a bomb on Saddam, keep the infrastructure, and allow a new government to flourish Thus avoiding occupation, destruction, Sunni-Shiite violence, U.S. casualties and a un-win-able, no-objective standoff?

I said, "?!"

It must be some seriously intelligent stuff, cause I can't for the life of me make any possible sense out of it.

Originally, the plan wasn't to lose, misplace and misappropriate $23 billion in cash. The U.S. State Department had drawn up equally inept plans for the rebuilding of Iraq, but all of that was swept aside by the Bush Administration, which put the Pentagon in charge of rebuilding Iraq under the control of Paul Bremmer and the provisional authority.

The first thing Bremmer did was suspend Iraqi law. Then he suspended U.S. Law. After creating what has been quoted as being a "fraud free zone" war profiteers descended from every corner of the globe with only political connections, duffle bags and no staff, no facilities, no infrastructure, no equipment, no plans and no track record in international service.

Part of the reason why money was spent so carelessly was because the leading experts in Iraq in the industries that needed to be rebuilt, from Electricity, Sewage, Water supply, Medical Facilities, were all purged in a process called "De-Bathification". All members of Saddam Hussein's former party were effectively blacklisted.

What it amounted to was a genocide of ideas, a genocide of experience and an era where the uneducated, the unknowledgeable began grasping for cash and straws in the dark, in ignorance and with no fiscal oversight, or controls.

Some of the more notable "planned" fuck-ups were:

1. Vice-Pres. Cheney's former/current company, Halliburton was the largest recipient of money with an estimated 1.6 billion entrusted to reinstate the oil supply. By most estimates it overcharged the government by $177 million, and by the way, Iraq now produced LESS oil that before the war.

2. The Provisional Authority maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork

3. $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad is unaccounted for.

4. Independent auditors found that contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, with no idea what was happening to the money.

5. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, garnered huge bribes from illegitimate and legitimate companies for the opportunity to bid on contracts.

6. Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank.

7. Between $11-$26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for.

8. Most Iraqi Government payrolls were padded with hundreds of ghost employees.

9. 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5m, were found on a plane in Lebanon that had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.

10. Iraqi oil exports were un-metered. therefore there was no way to account for how much oil went out of Iraq, thus, how much money came in.

11. Auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totaling $327 million. To quote the findings, "Our review showed that financial records understated payments made by $108,255,875" and "overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286".

12. Auditors also reviewed the paperwork of a further 300 contracts worth $332.9 million stating, "Of 198 contract files reviewed, 154 did not contain evidence that goods and services were received, 169 did not contain invoices, and 14 did not contain evidence of payment."

13. $8.8 billion - the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 - was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and most of the ministries had no budget departments.

14. One ministry gave out $430 million in contracts without any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found.

15. Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork only hours before they headed to the airport. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount.

Pretty disgusting huh?