got meh...maybe paid debt to kuwait or simply use to pay staffs
to maintain orders, anyway, in any wars, there is a price to
pay.
Since you also dunno, how can you say...it is a horrific story
and incompetence, corruption etc etc....check it out before
insulting others ya.
I think you must be drinking whiskey while posting
Missing Iraq billions could be 'greatest fraud in US
history'
Stephen C. Webster
Published: Monday February 16, 2009
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Missing_Iraq_billions_could_be_greatest_0216.html
The US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction
(SIGIR), the Army's criminal Investigation Command and the Justice
Department are investigating US soldiers and officials in the
alleged misuse of a portion of the $125 billion initially sent to
Iraq for reconstruction shortly after the fall of Saddam.
Monday, The Independent's Iraq correspondent Patrick
Cockburn reported the inspectors believe misuse may account for over $50 billion,
exceeding the scope of Bernie Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme and
making it potentially the "greatest fraud in US history."
"In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was
sent in 'pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills' to the US
comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had
himself photographed standing with the mound of money," wrote
Cockburn. "He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be
convicted of fraud and money-laundering.
"Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003,
there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except
those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a
half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was
overthrown."
The SIGIR auditor's report, entitled "Hard Lessons," was published
in early February.
"'Hard Lessons,' a draft of which was leaked to the news media in
December, concludes that the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was
a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind
it," reported the Washington Post. "Goals
shifted from 'liberation' and an early military exit to massive,
ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition
Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004. Many of those projects --
over budget, poorly executed or, often, barely begun -- were
abandoned as security worsened.
"In a preface to the 456-page book, Bowen writes that he knew the
reconstruction was in trouble when he first visited Iraq in January
2004 and saw duffel bags full of cash being carried out of the
Republican Palace, which housed the U.S. occupation
government."
"As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at
information given to them by Dale Stoffel, an American arms dealer
and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004," reported the International Herald Tribune
on Sunday.
"Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Stoffel drew a
portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars
stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the
American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper
bags that were scattered in 'dead drops' around the Green Zone, the
nerve center of the United States government's presence in Iraq,
two senior federal officials said."
"Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to
reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private
contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at
higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the
case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections
between those officials and figures in the other cases. Although
Bell and Hirtle were military officers, they worked in a civilian
contracting office."
So far, there have been just 35 convictions for the misuse of
government funds during the reconstruction of Iraq.