The looting of Iraq.

It is a story of corruption and incompetence which is typical of the Bush administration. The Guardian published this story July 08, 2005 describing the looting of Iraq by Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

Bush preemptively invaded Iraq for reasons he has yet to be honest about, then demanded that reconstruction of Iraq by paid for with Iraqi funds. The Coalition Provisional Authority under Jerry Bremer then proceeded to pile Iraqi money in a room with a single guard and hand it out to contractors with little or no oversight. The funds included $16 billion in Iraqi funds, mostly from oil-for-food funds and frozen Iraqi assets, together with $18.4 billion of U.S. Tax money appropriated by the U.S. Congress. It was all

...intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "in a transparent manner ... for the benefit of the Iraqi people".

The "financial irregularities" described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated. Truckloads of dollars were handed out for which neither they nor the recipients felt they had to be accountable.

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security"."

This is theft from the Iraqi people and from the American people. It amounts to armed robbery. Then the stolen funds are handed out as bribes and gifts to American-only 'contractors'. Then besides being corrupt and immoral, it was done totally incompetently without even the hint of controls and audit procedures.

Here are some examples of how the theft was conducted:

"Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11m and $26m worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work. Some $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for "personnel not in the field performing work" and "other improper charges" on just one oil pipeline repair contract.

Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPAIG instigated related to alleged theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion. It also investigated "a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report". One such case may have arisen when 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5m, was found on a plane in Lebanon that had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister. "

Not only is was the CPA under Jerry Bremer totally corrupt, it has not been as competent as most tinpot third world dictators. It was sufficiently competent, however, to stall the audit report so that it wasn't released until July after the CPA had handed off the government to the Iraqis and Jerry Bremer has left Iraq.

Perhaps we should ask where Republican Congressmen Bob Ney, Randy "Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay were during this period. Did they get their share of the graft?

Besides being incompetent in almost all respects, the Bush administration is going to be recognized in history as the most corrupt American Presidential administration ever, easily outdoing Warren G. Harding and his Teapot Dome scandal.