"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States handed out nearly $20 billion of Iraq's funds, with a rush to spend billions in the final days before transferring power to the Iraqis nearly a year ago, a report said on Tuesday."
"One single shipment amounted to $2.4 billion -- the largest movement of cash in the bank's history, said Waxman.Somehow I suspect that Halliburton got their share, as did many other favored contractors. Remember that the Bush administration did not give contracts to contractors from outside the U.S.?
Most of these funds came from frozen and seized assets and from the Development Fund for Iraq, which succeeded the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. After the U.S. invasion, the U.N. directed this money should be used by the CPA for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
Cash was loaded onto giant pallets for shipment by plane to Iraq, and paid out to contractors who carried it away in duffel bags.
The report, released at a House of Representatives committee hearing, said despite the huge amount of money, there was little U.S. scrutiny in how these assets were managed."
The secrecy of the Bush administration is supposedly caused by Bush's secretive nature and the requirements for secrecy in the so-called "Global War on Terror." That's a load of crap. The secrecy is there to protect the guilty as they steal the American government blind.
When I grew up the worst financial scandal in American government history was the Teapot Dome Scandal which started in the Warren K. Harding administration. The Bush/Cheney administration is going to set all new records for corruption and theft of public resources.
[Thanks to Dave Johnson at TalkLeft who directed me to a dKos Diary by Anaxagoras who linked to the article in Truthout. The Truthout article was a reprint of the Washington Post article that I linked to earlier.
Clearly not new (except to me), but it connects with my focus on the corruption of the Bush administration.]
No comments:
Post a Comment