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August 19, 2004
More missing, yawn.
I've been writing for months about how the Iraqi Development Fund, which held oil-for-food funds, frozen Iraqi assets and Iraqi money appropriated by the U.S. military, had been bled dry -- while American money allocated for Iraq by Congress had been left almost untouched. Of course, not-coincidentally, this created the perfect conditions for leverage for the incoming U.S. "ambassador" Negroponte -- I still haven't figured out how one appoints an ambassador to a country one is occupying -- as the "interim government" will have very little money of its own to spend.
I also wrote about how a lot of Iraqi money was given to American commanders to spend in cash, without receipts, and to Halliburton and other American corporations in no-bid contracts. There was supposed to be a U.N. mandated audit of the Iraq Development Fund but the coalition authority either refused to let the auditors even enter the green zone or didn't turn over the documentation and gently let the deadline for the audit come and go. Since there wasn't that much of an outrage, that seems to have been that for the U.N.-mandated audit.
Hey, it's only Iraqi money we're talking about, right?
So, we now learn that another $8.8 billion is unaccounted for:
At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, according to a draft U.S. audit set for release soon....
Among the draft audit’s findings were that payrolls in Iraqi ministries under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority were padded with thousands of ghost employees.
In one example, the audit said the CPA paid for 74,000 guards even though the actual number could not be validated. In another, 8,206 guards were listed on a payroll but only 603 people doing the work could be counted.
Meanwhile, the actual American tax-payer money that hasn't been spent remains unspent:
A State Department assessment of how the agency will direct almost $18 billion in unspent aid to rebuild Iraq is running about a month behind schedule, a delay frustrating at least one key member of Congress already upset by the slow pace of reconstruction spending.The delay, acknowledged by senior officials last week, comes just two weeks after Secretary of State Colin Powell promised during a visit to Baghdad to speed up the roughly $18.4 billion Congress approved last year for Iraqi reconstruction.
...
Although Congress approved the $18.4 billion aid package on an emergency basis last year after the Bush administration said it was urgently needed, only about $600 million, or roughly 3 percent, has been spent so far.
We want rebuild your country, but we will not spend any of our money and squander yours -- plus, we'll complain about how much money we're spending on you. We'd like to bring democracy, but let's first shut down a few newspapers and cancel elections. We'd like to turn sovereignty over to you, but we'll keep a few hundred thousand troops under our command on your soil with full immunity from your laws.
And now they don't like us, those ungrateful Iraqis. It's because they're all irrational, I tell you.
Posted by zeynep at August 19, 2004 11:13 PM
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Comments
Though a report from the US State Department may show that the US federal government is not trying to /completely/ ignore this, yet the reports may leave one with a hunch that perhaps much of congress hasn't been seeing this in its field of vision.
In regards to that, for the reader:
http://congress.org/congressorg/dbq/officials/ : find and *contact* state representatives to the US federal legislature.
(The gratis hand-delivered-message-by-Western-Union feature - under the "Extra Impact" link, in a search-results page, from the former - seems more than quaint.)
http://smartvoter.org/voter/search.html : SmartVoter county and ballot search. Their search-results pages also link to a locality's local media sites, in addition to those of the area's official government bodies
Posted by: Sean Champ at August 21, 2004 12:29 PM
Regarding my comment, above: It was a mistake of hopefulness. The Western Union "Extra Impact" message delivery option is not gratis. Perhaps an email might be effective enough, however.
Posted by: Sean Champ at August 21, 2004 12:56 PM