Missing money in Iraq? from 2006: "We played football with bricks of $100 bills"

[deminks]

Every time this subject comes up, I try to repost this article from the Guardian from March of 2006.

'Iraq was awash in cash. We played football with bricks of $100 bills'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/20/usa.iraq

At the beginning of the Iraq war, the UN entrusted $23bn of Iraqi money to the US-led coalition to redevelop the country. With the infrastructure of the country still in ruins, where has all that money gone? Callum Macrae and Ali Fadhil on one of the greatest financial scandals of all time

In a dilapidated maternity and paediatric hospital in Diwaniyah, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Zahara and Abbas, premature twins just two days old, lie desperately ill. The hospital has neither the equipment nor the drugs that could save their lives. On the other side of the world, in a federal courthouse in Virginia, US, two men - one a former CIA agent and Republican candidate for Congress, the other a former army ranger - are found guilty of fraudulently obtaining $3m (£1.7m) intended for the reconstruction of Iraq. These two events have no direct link, but they are none the less products of the same thing: a financial scandal that in terms of sheer scale must rank as one of the greatest in history.

At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized Iraqi assets, was to be used in a "transparent manner", specified the UN, for "purposes benefiting the people of Iraq".

(snip)

In the corridor, an anxious father who has been told his son may have meningitis is berating the staff. "I want a good hospital, not a terrible hospital that makes my child worse," he says. But then he calms down. "I'm not blaming you, we are the same class. I'm talking about important people. Those controlling all those millions and the oil. They didn't come here to save us from Saddam, they came here for the oil, and so now the oil is stolen and we got nothing from it." Beside him another parent, a woman, agrees: "If the people who run the country are stealing the money, what can we do?" For these ordinary Iraqis, it is clear that the country's wealth is being managed in much the same way as it ever was. How did it all go so wrong?

(snip)

"Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money," says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. "We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced."

(end snip)

Nobody did anything then. The subject comes up from time to time. I have no doubt that now there is upwards of $50 bn missing. We are still at war, now aren't we. A new president, and maybe now we can wonder some more where the money went. Too bad we have to keep looking forward.

[soothsayer]

1. Missing billions? who cares. we need the 3 trillion that went missing from the pentagon

the day before 9/11 (well, Rummy announced on 9/10 that it was missing)

[Mist]

2. The money wasn't missing, IMO, just siphoned off to black ops or something. nt

[onethatcares]

3. not black ops, but into the hands of the wealthiest in the world.

because they could.

[Sal Minella]

5. And I hear the Carlyle Group is buying up chains of nursing homes?

While the powers behind Big Pharma keep coming up with new perpetual, everlasting gobstopper "treatments" for diseases/illnesses instead of cures?

So we're all in good hands.

[Gman]

4. I will never forget this and

I bring it up to each and every winger I run across. I bring it up now when they bring up the stimulus bill and tell them they don't have a goddam thing to say about it.