The following was cobbled together from a number of sources including the New York Times and Bloomberg News discussing this past week's hearings conducted by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into widespread corruption amongst contractors in Iraq. The selection included below deals specifically with former former Ambassador
L. Paul Bremer's shady dealing with contractors like Halliburton and the infamous Custer Battles while he was effectively running Iraq as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) from May 2003 to June 2004.
Last week, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., opened hearings on government contracting in Iraq and revealed some eye-popping details of a post-war environment awash in $100 bills. His questioning of former Ambassador L. Paul Bremer focused on what happened to as much as $12-billion in unaccounted-for cash that was spent when Bremer was in charge of rebuilding Iraq as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Since there were no banks operating after the invasion, the U.S. currency was shipped from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to Iraq on pallets loaded into C-130 airplanes. (Most of the money came from Iraqi oil sales and frozen or seized Iraqi assets.)
Contractors and employees were paid in cash, leading to some logistical problems. Contractors were told to "bring a big bag" when they came to the CPA for payment, according to one official. Some cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices.
A statistical summary
- total number of pallets shipped from the Federal Reserve Bank to Iraq: 484
- weight of cash shipped: 363 tons
- cash shipment in April 2003: $20 million
(initial shipment; in $1, $5, $10 bills)
- cash shipment in November 2003: $500 million
- cash shipment on Dec. 12, 2003: $1.5 billion
- cash shipment on June 22, 2004: $2.4 billion
(The largest shipment sent to Iraq. In fact, it's the largest payout of U.S. currency in Federal Reserve history.)
- a single disbursement in security funding: $500 million
(The minutes of a CPA meeting labeled the purpose of this disbursement only as "to be determined".)
- amount one official in south central Iraq was given: $6.75-million
(The official was ordered to spend it in a week, before the Iraqis took control.)
- amount a CPA official witnessed being paid to contractor Custer Battles in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills: $2 million
(Custer Battles has been banned from doing business with the Department of Defense due to being prosecuted for fraud and for being under investigation for the brutalization of Iraqi citizens.)
- other monies allegedly disbursed without proper assurances of how it would be used: $8.8-billion
To be fair, the vast majority of the funds were seized from Hussein's Iraq immediately after the invasion and were only converted into U.S. dollars for storage at the Federal Reserve (i.e. they were not U.S. government funds in any way). However, the fact that this Iraqi money was mishandled (and, in fact, quite possibly outright stolen) also means that much of the relief funds that *have* been doled out by the U.S. government -- which comes from our tax dollars -- have only been dispensed b/c the Iraqi's money was "lost" in the first place. So ultimately the contractors are ripping off the U.S. government -- and ultimately, we, the taxpayers -- as much as they were ripping off the Iraqi government. This is exactly the kind of conclusion that Bremer, the contractors and other Bush cronies do *not* want the House Oversight Committee, and thereby the American people, to make.
Waxman is kind of a goof and stumbled through the proceedings at times, but here and there he made some points that simply hit the nail on the head and boiled down the facts to the essentials. For example:
"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? We have no way of knowing if the cash that was shipped into the Green Zone ended up in enemy hands."
So the best case scenario is that we've found irrefutable proof that contractors have been ripping off the U.S. and Iraqi governments this whole time. However, the worst case scenario is that our government is that we are also so goddamn inept that we may have inadvertently been funding insurgents and/or terrorists that are killing our troops and employees of the very same contractors whose greed helped set off this mess in the first place.