The Thief of Baghdad

[acmavm]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/19620/

By Pratap Chatterjee, AlterNet. Posted August 23, 2004.

Missing: one-third of the Pentagon's equipment and $1.9 billion of Iraqi money. Guess who has it?

<snip>

Missing: One giant generator owned by the United States military. Estimated cost: $734,863

Last seen: Somewhere in Iraq.

<snip>

Embarrassed military authorities did eventually track down the missing generator and much of the money, both of which seemed to have ended up with none other than Halliburton. As it turns out they weren't missing after all; it's just that Dick Cheney's former employer had misplaced or conveniently forgotten to turn in the receipts to the correct people

But the Pentagon was not able to explain just how Halliburton gained possession of Iraqi funds when neither the United States Congress nor the Iraqi government authorized their transfer to Halliburton in the first place. Worse yet, the man who authorized the allocation – CPA chief Paul Bremer – had already quietly left Iraq just as the reports were being released.

Yet days after the much-touted "transfer of sovereignty," the White House revealed an even more startling detail about the reconstruction effort: In over a year, the CPA had managed to spend just 2 percent of the $18.4 billion earmarked for the immediate reconstruction of Iraq. And not a penny was spent on the two areas where the Iraqi people were suffering the most: healthcare or water and sanitation.

-MORE-

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Bush does lots of things just for show

Like authorizing $18 billion that he doesn't intend to spend or wants to shuffle around to other projects or to friends.

[CanIgonow]

2. Let us assume that there are "contractors" from Israel, India,

Australia and other countries moonlighting as Halliburton employees doing jobs you and I cannot talk about and Congress certainly shouldn't know about.How would you pay them? Does that give an indication of where the 18 Billion are going?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. It seems clear the 18 billion is not spent, but there's another cache

It seems clear that the $18 billion is not being spent, but there is another $8 billion that got lost under Bremer and was not accounted for.