disrupter
09-12-2007, 09:42 PM
Pentagon directly responsible for losing [stealing] 9 billion dollars in Iraq.
They hired a company, associated with fraud, who didn't have a single accountant in their employ to ship 18 wheelers full of pallets of US dollars to Iraq.
This is some pretty wild stuff.
A lot of insider contractors got rich very quick.
Pockets as stuffed with hundred dollar bills as is possible.
Billions Over Baghdad
James Steele & Donald Barlett of Vanity Fair
interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the irony of the Coalition Provisional Authority initials, CPA, that there was no accounting.
DONALD BARLETT: Exactly.
JAMES STEELE: No certified public accountant on duty.
DONALD BARLETT: No. And this is an interesting organization in itself, because when we traced it back, it is literally a rogue agency within this country. There is no formal document establishing it. Congress has funded it with taxpayer dollars at that time, but it was never created within the legal process of Congress.http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/12/1410243
DONALD BARLETT:But what is striking about this is that here you have $12 billion and actually many more billions later coming through that process, but no auditing arm established to track the money. And that is just amazing.
JAMES STEELE:This was totally [the Pentagon's] entity. And it became an absolutely perfect sieve for this cash, because it only existed for fourteen months, and then we turned Iraq over to the Iraqis. And during that period, because it was not a US government agency, because it was not really an entity of the UN, because it was a rogue operation, as Don has mentioned, nobody was responsible for really what happened to that money.
. . . .
I mean, it’s a classic Catch-22 situation. I mean, you’ve created this thing that isn’t legitimate, therefore you can’t sue it.
DONALD BARLETT: And the other thing is that the Pentagon did establish an auditing, basically, for us to track the money, make sure it was spent properly. So who does the auditing contract go to, but something called NorthStar Consultants, run out of a million-dollar home in La Jolla, California, with a post office box in Nassau, Bahamas, which also happens to be the post office box set up for a $200 million securities swindle a few years earlier. And the company was actually created -- the company in charge of monitoring the money to making sure it’s spent right -- was created by a Bahamian man for the -- on the behalf of the San Diego man who ran it. But the Bahamas guy who set this up also had set up and been involved in companies linked to the $200 million swindle. And this was the group that the Pentagon put in charge of seeing where the money went, which means one of two things: the Pentagon didn't want anyone to know where the money was going, or they wanted it to go a certain place that nobody knows about
Link to Vanity Fair Story:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/10/iraq_billions200710?currentPage=6
We have no accounting for how many of these billions made their way into the hands of insurgents & were used to kill US troops.
This kind of loose, unaccounted cash just fuels corruption & decays any kind of legitimate government.
They hired a company, associated with fraud, who didn't have a single accountant in their employ to ship 18 wheelers full of pallets of US dollars to Iraq.
This is some pretty wild stuff.
A lot of insider contractors got rich very quick.
Pockets as stuffed with hundred dollar bills as is possible.
Billions Over Baghdad
James Steele & Donald Barlett of Vanity Fair
interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the irony of the Coalition Provisional Authority initials, CPA, that there was no accounting.
DONALD BARLETT: Exactly.
JAMES STEELE: No certified public accountant on duty.
DONALD BARLETT: No. And this is an interesting organization in itself, because when we traced it back, it is literally a rogue agency within this country. There is no formal document establishing it. Congress has funded it with taxpayer dollars at that time, but it was never created within the legal process of Congress.http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/12/1410243
DONALD BARLETT:But what is striking about this is that here you have $12 billion and actually many more billions later coming through that process, but no auditing arm established to track the money. And that is just amazing.
JAMES STEELE:This was totally [the Pentagon's] entity. And it became an absolutely perfect sieve for this cash, because it only existed for fourteen months, and then we turned Iraq over to the Iraqis. And during that period, because it was not a US government agency, because it was not really an entity of the UN, because it was a rogue operation, as Don has mentioned, nobody was responsible for really what happened to that money.
. . . .
I mean, it’s a classic Catch-22 situation. I mean, you’ve created this thing that isn’t legitimate, therefore you can’t sue it.
DONALD BARLETT: And the other thing is that the Pentagon did establish an auditing, basically, for us to track the money, make sure it was spent properly. So who does the auditing contract go to, but something called NorthStar Consultants, run out of a million-dollar home in La Jolla, California, with a post office box in Nassau, Bahamas, which also happens to be the post office box set up for a $200 million securities swindle a few years earlier. And the company was actually created -- the company in charge of monitoring the money to making sure it’s spent right -- was created by a Bahamian man for the -- on the behalf of the San Diego man who ran it. But the Bahamas guy who set this up also had set up and been involved in companies linked to the $200 million swindle. And this was the group that the Pentagon put in charge of seeing where the money went, which means one of two things: the Pentagon didn't want anyone to know where the money was going, or they wanted it to go a certain place that nobody knows about
Link to Vanity Fair Story:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/10/iraq_billions200710?currentPage=6
We have no accounting for how many of these billions made their way into the hands of insurgents & were used to kill US troops.
This kind of loose, unaccounted cash just fuels corruption & decays any kind of legitimate government.