$Billions given to CPA for Iraq reconstruction are missing.

Great Debates
1

Paul Bremer can’t say where they went. His assistant and budget chief, David Oliver, says, “Frankly, it not important.” Because, “This wasn’t American money.” ( :confused: Wasn’t it appropriated by Congress?) But Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, seems to think it is important.

Story here.

And here.

Related Pit thread.

  1. Who got the money?!

  2. Why was it shipped to Iraq in the form of unmarked $100 bills?

  3. Can/will anyone be brought to justice over this? Considering the indeterminate questions of whether the Coalition Provisional Authority was a U.S. government agency, and whether it ever had any legal existence? (See these threads.)

2

Another story, in the UK’s Guardian.

3

My WAGs:

Starts with an “H” and ends in “aliburton.”

To make it easier to steal, duh.

Before the November elections, I’d have said “no way in hell.” Right now I’m upgrading it to a cautiously optimistic “don’t hold your breath.”

4

And Reuters.

5
  1. Anyone in Iraq who’d fleece us - which doesn’t exactly narrow it down
  2. Would you like to mark that many bills? Also, who would look for them if they were marked?
  3. Why do you hate America? :smiley:
6

This money wasn’t **given ** to the CPA and it wasn’t for Iraq’s reconstruction. It was Iraqi funds that belonged to Iraq and were being held by the US Government. Iraq had the right to ask for it, and to do with it whatever they wanted.

That said, Bremer was in charge before the Iraqi government really established itself, so there’s a question of who exactly had the right to ask for these funds. It wasn’t the Iraqi president, nor was it any kind of legislative body - the request came from a single Iraqi official in the finance ministry. Bremer was also supposed to be assisting Iraq into becoming a Responsible Democracy, and one would expect “Preventing looters access to the national treasury” would be a responsibility which would, if not explicitly stated, at least be an implied part of that role. So would “Preventing the insurgency from gaining ascendency by throwing gobs of cash to random officials without accountability.”

Any kind of responsible Iraqi government would use that money for reconstruction. Bremer (at the time) had the ability (and the White House support) to withhold the money until he knew what it was for and who it was going to.

7

I think $1 billion worth of $100 bills is a bit harder to steal than you think. About eighty tons of cash doesn’t exactly fit in a knapsack.

8

Not all at once, no. But with chaos in the streets, who’s gonna notice an extra looter or forty?

9

According to the US mint

10 million $100 dollar bills would thus weigh in at 11.02 short tons.

10

But where did it come from in the first place? It was the U.S. Treasury, was it not? Not the pre-invasion Iraqi treasury, I mean. Some of it came from post-invasion Iraqi oil revenue, but not all of it.

This post breaks down the amounts.

11

This is outrageous. The Iraqis think they can build a stable, functional democratic government by handing out forkloads of cash without accountability? Have they learned nothing from observing the superior western democracies? Do they not know that a democracy should hand out money by means of a staggeringly huge bureaucracy that defies accountabilty by size alone?

12

You seem to be implying that this was taxpayer money which was allocated by the US Congress. According to all sources who have to far been reported, this is absolutely not the case. This was Iraqi money, period. Whether it came from pre-invasion frozen assets or entirely post invasion oil profits, the reports do not currently tell us.

If by “The US Treasury” you mean that the money was disbursed by the Fed, well, you’re partly right. The Fed did disburse the money, but the Fed is NOT the US Treasury. In fact, the Fed is only partly a government agency; the member banks which make up the Fed are privately owned. (Read more about the Fed here.) The member banks hold money for all kinds of governments around the world. Remember Die Hard 3, when the robbers busted into a bank that had multiple piles of gold, each behind an individual steel door with a nation’s name on it? There was the “Saudi Arabia” pile of gold, the “Germany” pile of gold… that was supposed to be the Fed bank in New York city. To put it in Hollywood terms, you can think of this whole transaction as emptying out the pile of gold marked “Iraq”.*

I’ve just finished a short conversation with the person who wrote that post, and he assures me that he’s in complete and total agreement with everything I say.

*Apologies to any of you business major types who find my explanation hopelessly inadequate. Hey, nobody else was stepping up and responding.

13

Does this remind anyone else of a scene from Goldfinger? I’m envisioning this dialogue in my mind (apologies to Richard Maibaum):
INT. OVAL OFFICE - NIGHT

George Bush: You’ll kill 60,000 people uselessly.

Dick Cheney: Hah. American motorists kill that many every two years.

George Bush: Yes, well, I’ve worked out a few statistics of my own. $12,000,000,000 in $100 bills weighs 363 tons. 10 men would take 2 days to load it onto 20 trucks. Now, at the most, you’re going to have 2 hours before the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines move in and make you put it back.

Dick Cheney: Who mentioned anything about removing it?

[Bush is stunned into silence]

Dick Cheney: The julep tart enough for you?

George Bush: You plan to break into Iraq’s biggest cash depository, but not to steal anything. Why?

Dick Cheney: Go on, Mr. Bush.

George Bush: [constipated] Mr. Kim, the North Korean at the factory, he’s a specialist in nuclear fission… but of course! His government’s given you a bomb.

Dick Cheney: I prefer to call it an “atomic device.” It’s small, but particularly dirty.

George Bush: Cobalt and iodine?

Dick Cheney: Precisely.

George Bush: Well, if you detonated it in Baghdad, the… the entire money supply of the Iraq would be radioactive for… fifty-seven years.

Dick Cheney: Fifty-eight, to be exact.

George Bush: I apologize, Cheney. It’s an inspired deal! We get what we want, economic chaos in the Middle East. And the value of your Halliburton stock increases many times.

Dick Cheney: I conservatively estimate, ten times.

George Bush: Brilliant. Stranger

14

You’re probably right. I must have been confused because all the stories described the money being shipped to Iraq.

So, we took Iraq’s U.S. reserves, and shipped them to Baghdad and put them in the hands of the CPA, all of whose top personnel were appointed by GWB . . . so responsibility lies . . . where?

15

BTW, has Congress voted any funds (out of the U.S. Treasury/Budget) for Iraq reconstruction? If so, how much, and how was it spent? Does anybody know?

16

Yes, the money was shipped to Iraq. It was the biggest disbursement of cash that the Fed had ever done. So, not only have we failed to build up Iraq ourselves, we deprived Iraq of one of their own biggest resources for building themselves up by facilitating what appears to be the biggest robbery in the history of the world.

Responsibility lies with Bremer, and by association Bush. This was exactly the kind of thing Bremer was supposed to prevent, along with the looting of Iraq’s museum peices. He failed all the way across the board. You know what his excuse for giving them the money was? He thought it would help stabilize the country. It actually makes a certain amount of sense if you look at it from a really bizarre angle - the entire country was in ruins and needed to get back on its feet. An influx of cash would certainly help. But Bremer literally - *literally * - threw billions of dollars at the problem with reckless abandon and no accountability whatsoever. Furthermore, he freely admits it. I can’t believe people like this are put in control of entire countries. Brings to mind visions of Bremer putting out street fires by burying them under mounds of cash. Couldn’t we have gotten a fireman or a cop who are used to handling emergency situations and know how to keep their head on straight to run Iraq instead of Bremer?

Short answer - yes, they have, and lots of it has come up missing too. Long answer - go look it up! You have an internet connection just like everybody else, dude!

17

Smartass.

OK, according to the Wikipedia article on Reconstruction of Iraq:

According to the article on the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund: Congress in 2003 allocated $18.4 billion to the IRRF, its spending overseen by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (a position scheduled to terminate on 10/1/07). The current SIGIR is Stuart Bowen. “As of March 29, 2006, approximately $16.3 billion, or 89%, had been obligated and $11.4 billion had been expended. The fund has come under some criticism due to the slowness with which the allocated money has been disbursed, largely because of the time-comsuming US procurement process.” (Which I guess is still better than throwing it around recklessly the way Bremer did with Iraq’s own assets.) The article mentions no controversy about whether what money has been spent has been well spent, or wasted, or “come up missing”.

The Development Fund for Iraq, OTOH, was set up to take Iraq’s state oil revenue and disburse it to the CPA for reconstruction. That doesn’t seem to have worked out too well either.

18

Rebuilding Iraq funds squandered due to corruption

This was just the first example I came up with after a brief search of news articles. The money I’m referring to here is US money (not Iraqi money) that was earmarked by Congress and the President for rebuilding Iraq. Money from taxes that US citizens (like me and most of the people on the board) paid out of our paychecks. Gone missing, or unused.

There are plenty of other examples if you’re willing to do the news search. No cite, but I remember reading last week about some soldiers who were being investigated for corruption. Among other things, they had grabbed “Bricks of cash” from loads of shrinkwrapped dollars shipped to Iraq. The report (as I recall) identified the cash as being from the US funded reconstruction effort, not Iraqi cash (although I or the report may have been mistaken. Does it really matter which bucket was being stole from in this case?)

19

Of course it does. Stealing American money would be unpatriotic.

20

But were the soldiers in question American or Iraqi?