Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Ghastly report, courtesy of the London Review of Books' Ed Harriman, about what, exactly, happened to all that money floating around post-invasion occupied Iraq. Just for starters:

The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.

The talk about "all that money" almost never mentions that the billions squirting out of the CPA firehose were the occupied country's own. On the face of it, this seems a good thing -- like the (post-Mission Accomplished) UN Resolution 1483 says, the money was to be spent for the good of the Iraqis themselves.

Heh. (That's Halliburton, KBR, and Bremer himself nudging you with their elbows.)

It's a long article, based on numerous sources (especially last year's GAO audit), but here are some highlights of the ways in which not just Iraqi, but US funds were misappropriated or unaccounted for:

• "Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash [in Iraqi funds] for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch."
  
• "$8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for."
• "Halliburton was charging $2.64 a gallon for petrol for Iraqi civilians, while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon."
• "When the auditors asked to see the files of payments to subcontractors to back up the invoices KBR submitted to the government, there weren’t any: ‘We found no such documents included in KBR’s subcontract files, nor did we find any log of subcontractor payments.’"
• "An Iraqi hospital administrator told me [i.e., Harriman] that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package."
• "Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work: $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on a single oil pipeline repair contract. An Iraqi sports coach was paid $40,000 by the CPA. He gave it to a friend who gambled it away then wrote it off as a legitimate loss. ‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister."

I can't quote any more of this; it's just too disgusting. The whole affair ought to embarrass the sh!t out of anyone who claims we're in Iraq for noble purposes. It also ought to embarrass the sh!t out of anyone who likes to point to the UN Oil for Food "scandal" as evidence of larcenous intent. Lord knows it embarrasses me. If we don't see any indictments from any of this, whatever prosecutor has been put in charge should be next on the co-conspirators' list.