28 June 2011

As much as $18,000,000,000 "missing" in Iraq

From a story posted at Al Jazeera:
Osama al-Nujaifi, the Iraqi parliament speaker, has told Al Jazeera that the amount of Iraqi money unaccounted for by the US is $18.7bn - three times more than the reported $6.6bn... "Iraq's development fund has lost around $18bn of Iraqi money in these operations - their location is unknown. Also missing are the documents of expenditure...

The Bush administration flew in a total of $20bn in cash into the country in 2004. This was money that had come from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets. Officials in Iraq were supposed to give out the money to Iraqi ministries and US contractors, intended for the reconstruction of the country...

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that Iraqi officials argue that the US government was supposed to safeguard the stash under a 2004 legal agreement it signed with Iraq, hence making Washington responsible for the cash that has disappeared.

Pentagon officials have contended for the last six years that they could account for the money if given enough time to track down the records. The US has audited the money three times, but has still not been able to say exactly where it went...

"Safeguarding the money was up to the Americans ... after the invasion, provisional authority here was run by the American military.

"Piles and piles of shrink-wrapped US dollars came here, but the cash coming in is not the important part - it is what happened to it after [it got here].

"There are no documents to indicate who got it, where it was spent and what was ever built from it."
I think I can hear General Smedley Butler chuckling in the background...

6 comments:

  1. William Gibson's novel Zero History incorporates a cargo container full of this stolen cash from Iraq as a plot point... I should have realized he was referring to a real thing.

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  2. Stories such as this one leave me feeling overwhelmingly sorry for most of the people that live in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. People who want nothing but to live in peace, and whose lives and countries are instead used as pawns in political and ideological schemes.

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  3. I'm with Tess - we might complain about our governments (I know we Brits love to) but these poor buggers get this on top of all their other troubles.

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  4. That equals about 60 years of throwing money at Central America's Drug War.

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  5. Has anyone asked Hilliburton or Blackwater where the money is?

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  6. Perhaps we could piece some of this together with white house emails? Oh wait, those disappeared, too... wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controversy

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