The Thief of Baghdad (thief is too soft a word)

[donsu]

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

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


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A team of auditors was dispatched to Iraq in late January this year after a string of internal reports showed that the military was wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. They have issued eleven reports since June 25, almost all of which have pointed to the misuse of the money allocated for reconstruction, be it Iraqi or Congress-appropriated funds.

According to two of these reports issued in late July by Stuart Bowen, the auditor-inspector general of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), not only have a full one-third of the items purchased by the Pentagon gone MIA (including the pricey generator), but a whopping. $1.9 billion or more of Iraqi oil revenue has also mysteriously disappeared.

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.
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(the article goes on to say that there are three treasure chests: Congress' $87 billion divided 1. $65 billion for military operations and 2. $18.4 billion for reconstruction. and 3. Iraq money from the sale of their oil.)

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So here is what it all means:

One, the U.S. taxpayers spent a lot of money on the soldiers, but the Pentagon paid Halliburton to do the work. The company billed the military top dollar knowing that the brass would look the other way. The gravy train finally ground to a halt when two brave members of Congress inquired about the results of the internal audit.

Two, almost none of the money that American taxpayers provided for reconstruction was spent because the rules were too stringent for the CPA's taste.

And three, we dished out Iraqi money to companies like Halliburton like it was going out of style because the United States government knew that neither Congress nor the United Nations would ask us difficult questions about what we were doing with other people's money. Equally importantly, Bush officials were worried that the new Iraqi government might ask us difficult questions about their money once they gained any modicum of power. So they were eager to spend the money while they could.

In other words, despite access to billions of dollars for reconstruction, the CPA has done little to serve the interests of either the American taxpayer or the Iraqi people. The reconstruction effort has, however, been a cash bonanza for companies like Halliburton.
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is this the greatest financial scam in history? historians?...........

(religions are the greatest scams of all)