The Twelve Billion Dollar Fumble
File under Famous Fuck-ups in the Short History of the Iraqi Invasion and Occupation Humanitarian Intervention:
Under Paul Bremer’s stewardship, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq requested $12 billion in cash from the US treasury which the US flew into Iraq in shrink-wrapped $100 bills. The Guardian notes in an article titled How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish.
The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.
The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.
In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.
The last word goes to Bremer’s “financial adviser”, retired Admiral David Oliver. In an interview by the BBC World Service he was asked what happened to the $8.8bn:
Oliver: “I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t - nor do I actually think it’s important.”
BBC: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”
Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?”
I’ll get anyone an MP3 album of their choice if they can point me to audio download of this BBC intreview.
February 8th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
What a story. The sheer level of stupidity involved is astounding.