Fraud and Corruption (The looting of Iraq)

[DainBramaged]

(It was published on 2/8, so I don't know if it's been chewed over yet)

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/02/08/fraud-and-corruption-/

Where has Iraq’s money gone?

<snip>
Four days before Paul Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority: the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The Inspector General’s job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn’t. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave.(6) This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.

The authority, the Inspector General found, was “burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management.”(7) This is kind. Other investigations suggest that it was also burdened by false accounting, fraud and corruption.

Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC’s File on Four programme that officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts.(8) Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800 million was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4bn was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has never been seen since.(9)
<snip>

And the distraction of Jeff Gannon pushes this off the radar. Why isn't Reid screaming about this?