What happened to the money? Who ultimately got it?
What’s this going to cost the United States? This money was supposed to be put back into the reconstruction of Iraq. Is our government going to have to make up the shortfall, if we still want to get the job done?
Whose fault is this? What went wrong, and who could have prevented it?
Separate but related question: Who can, or will, be held accountable? The CPA no longer exists, having been officially dissolved on 6/28/04. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Provisional_Authority The picture is further muddied by the CPA’s ambiguous legal status. It was run by U.S. presidential appointees, yet it might or might not have been an agency of the U.S. government. Even Congress doesn’t know. We’ve been discussing that in this GD thread: “Iraq contractor Custer Battles sued for fraud. Defense: CPA never existed!” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=304863
“A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.” – Will Rogers
Do you (or does anyone else) have a link to the actual report? It talks about “US auditors” but doesn’t say for which department. They have an official apparently talking about it on the record; surely this means that at least an abstract is public.
It’s hard to overestimate the difficulty anybody dealing with this money must face. Every drive from home to work is a kidnap risk. Running an office with daily power cuts can’t be easy.
Actually, this sounds to me like a very sensible decision. Rather than the risk of taking it off-site, hide it in an unobtrusive position that nobody would look at.
Personal disclaimer - Obviously, any misappropriation of money is wrong, etc etc etc.
The story attributes key statements to “the auditors’ chief of staff, Ms Ginger Cruz.” I googled the name but can’t find much. A Ginger Cruz was communications director for the governor of Guam, but that was in 1997. http://ns.gov.gu/guam/miracle/geri.html
Well the amount involved is too troublesome to be one of the huge contractors. Most of them “steal” from the government via manipulating their payment agreement, outright embezzling away $8.8b is too risky. I’d say there is a chance this is an accounting error, or lots of graft on the part of mid-level officials.
Wrong. Kidnap-for-ranson is a profitably business in Iraq. Businessmen are good targets - the money is there to pay, and they’re not high-profile enough to get media attention.
Interesting that an allegation of this magnitude is just plain sloughed off as not worth discussing, since that notoriously unreliable slanted news source, the BBC, perpetrated it.
All I have to say is that it’s typical of politically-oriented discussions around here lately. I expect soon to find someone seriously contending that the Watergate Affair was a nefarious Democratic plot to discredit the innocent Richard Nixon.
Pending some evidence that our “Bush at any cost” contingent might consider persuasive, I leave you with the quote attributed to the late Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (R.-Ill.):
Third, the cash evidently went to Iraqis. Some were mop pushers in government ministries. Some were guys sitting at home pretending that they had jobs at ministries. God knows what other Iraqis got the money.
Fourth, it has basically cost the US nothing, in an odd way. The money was used for salaries, not reconstruction. Salaries have almost exclusively been paid with Iraqi oil revenue, not US taxpayer dollars.
Fifth, nobody is going to answer for this. But Paul Bremer should.
Exqueeze me? “Sloughed off?” In response to a single news source with essentially no details at all I provided the links at which people could find the relevant reports themselves, including the background documents, prior reports, responses, etc. This would allow a person who wanted to have a good faith debate on this issue to be well-armed and to avoid the embarrassment which would be inevitable from over-relying on the BBC report (preview: no, there’s not $8.8 MM missing but the auditors are less than kind to the CPA even adjusting for the whole “fog of war” defense the CPA not-unreasonably put up). How precisely in the wide wide world of fuck is that “sloughing off”?
Perhaps not, but I think it would have made the news, if the CPA had paid out any significant amounts of money in ransom – especially as the Bush Admin has a well-known no-ransom policy.
Trully left leaning sourses paint a bleaker picture, so this could be closer to the truth.
Of course, I see the hand waiving by pointing out that it is in reality Iraq’s money so we in America should not be concerned. But I have a name for that: Imperialism, it just so happens that it is mostly in private hands so I guess it is not imperialism :rolleyes:. The ill gotten profit though is protected with American blood, and IMHO I think Iraquies outside the propaganda outlets, do know when they are being rob, many on the right are blissfully unaware that even moderate Iraqis would be stupid if they are not taking notice of this abuse, not doing anything about it only compounds the problem.
Well, in this case, apparently the robbers are also Iraqis, so that makes it all right, right? Right. I mean, it’s not imperialism if Americans aren’t profiting from this fraud. Is it? Or maybe it’s just singularly incompetent imperialism . . . What would Kipling have done with this, I wonder? :rolleyes:
Oh, but this then fits neo-imperialism, since the administration already acknowledged their model is El Salvador, there is a very old term used in Latin America to describe that: “presta hombres” literally it means “borrowers of men”, it is a term applied to the locals that work or steal (many do both) with the agreement and approval of the foreign power, in the future they are the seed for the quasi-fascist governments to come.