A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money
"WASHINGTON: A House committee report has questioned whether some of the billions of dollars in cash shipped to Iraq after the American invasion — mostly in huge, shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills — might have ended up with the insurgent groups now battling American troops.
The report was made public Tuesday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at a hearing when Democrats sharply questioned the former American civilian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, about lax management of the nearly $12 billion in cash shipped to Iraq between May 2003 and June 2004.[..]
"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?" ~ Rep. Henry Waxman
Rep. Waxman, D-CA, chairman of the committee, grilled Bremer about how he failed to establish any control over the money after 363 tons of cash was loaded onto airplanes and sent into the war zone in 2003. He said US officials had "no way of knowing whether the cash would wind up in enemy hands."
That's right .. we probably literally gave the enemy money so they could kill us.
Waxman said the total amount of Iraqi funds shipped to Iraq was $12 billion .. $8.8 billion of it can't be accounted for.
And Bremer tried (with little success) to explain what he did with a whopping 363 TONS of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad.
That'll be $12 billion in cold, hard American-taxpayer cash .. and no one, especially Bremer, seems to know what happened to it. He said a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi government to meet payrolls. Turns out, fraudulent payrolls.
The Department of Defense's special Inspector General for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, said that an audit he conducted found that in some ministries the payroll was padded with up to 90 percent "ghost employees" .. people who didn't really work there or maybe didn't really exist.
Bremer told Capitol Hill that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls, even though he knew they were bogus, because he didn't want to start riots among the Iraqis.
Okay. But why didn't he at least get a reciept somewhere?
I can't remember any time in American history when we sat idly by while $12 billion just sort of disappeared .. poof .. without a paper trail .. without heads rolling .. without someone doing some hard time.
What really galls me is that this was all happening at a time in the war when US soldiers and Marines were going without properly armored vehicles .. without lifesaving body armor .. and even without some of the weapons they needed.
It's about time we the people stood up on our hind legs and did something. When will we realize that this is only the tiny tip of an iceberg of fraud, waste, abuse and corruption .. pulled off by the Bush White House, its military contractor buddies and their lackies on Capitol Hill?
The cost of this war will soon reach a trillion dollars. How much of that was skimmed off by crooked and inept contractors, greedy defense corporations and Iraqi government crooks that we created and installed?
I'm waiting for them to ask Bremer or the inspector general how much of that $12 billion in cash was handed out to American contractors in Baghdad ...
So far we've wasted $600 billion on a war that we're losing, day by bloody day .. and here our president comes with a federal budget that cuts Medicare, Medicaid, Education, Homeland Security and even hits Veterans up for higher health care enrollment fees .. all to find billions more for that war.
Fat cats and rich corporations still get tax breaks that they don't need. And meanwhile, instead of trying to right the wrongs, many of our congresscritters -- on both sides of the aisle -- jockey for campaign contributions they need for re-election by putting themselves in the vest pockets of the very robber barons they're supposed to be policing.
So.... wasn't it nice that President Bush awarded Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
For what you ask? Must be for being completely incompetent and totally screwing up the first two years of the Iraq war beyond belief.
