February 07, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

PALLETS OF CASH

George W. Bush and his administration have all the traits of a banana republic. They steal elections. They start unnecessary wars. They transfer wealth to the people at the top and take from the people at the bottom. They are war profiteers. They kidnap and they torture. Now we learn that plane loads--literally--of cash were sent to Iraq. Nobody seems to know where those billions of dollars went. This article by Daniel Schulman is at www.motherjones.com:

While the impetus for the hearing was a point of contention, there was one thing everyone could agree on regardless of their political persuasion: No one — not the committee members or the distinguished panel assembled to testify — had any idea how billions of dollars in reconstruction funds were ultimately spent.

Shipped to Iraq by the ton on C-130 cargo planes laden with bricks of U.S. tender, the funding in question, held in the Development Fund for Iraq and totaling some $8.8 billion, was doled out by the CPA to Iraq’s fledgling government ministries between October 2003 and June 2004. Ostensibly, the cash went to pay for such things as salaries and overhead. Where it actually wound up is another story entirely. A 2005 audit by the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that the "CPA did not exercise adequate responsibility over DFI funds provided to Iraqi ministries through the national budget process" and sought no "assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for." The report raised the possibility that portions of the funding went to so-called ghost employees (whose only job responsibility would appear to be collecting a paycheck). It noted that though one Iraqi ministry had 8,206 on the payroll, CPA officials could confirm that only 602 of them actually worked there. Today, Waxman raised another, more ominous possibility — that reconstruction funding may have wound up in the hands of insurgents and other militant factions.