madmex Report This Comment Date: April 16, 2008 06:20PM
“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?” —
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
Pres. Bush said he vetoed the Democrats’ expansion of the SCHIP children’s
health insurance program because it was too costly. This confirms what we know
about the president’s priorities. But the cost to cover 10 million additional
children would be $35 billion, Democrats have pointed out, which is roughly what
it takes to run Bush’s war in Iraq for 41 days.
An even more apt example of the misplaced values of Bush and his party — of
taxpayer money squandered in Iraq that could have been put to good use in the
United States — is the story of the $12 billion or so that was flown into Iraq
and then went missing and will never be recovered. It sounds like a financial
scandal of historical proportions, and yet it is one of the most under-reported
story of the war:
The United States flew nearly $12 billion 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 U.S. congressional
committee.
In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes,
weighing 363 tons, 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.
After this was revealed in an investigation into Bush’s handling of his
invasion of Iraq, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Oversight
Committee was prompted to ask:
“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war
zone?”
Security in the war zone was so lax as to be non-existent:
“One [Bush Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)] official described an
environment awash in $100 bills,” the memorandum [on the investigation for
Waxman’s committee] says. “One contractor received a $2 million payment in a
duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered
that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.
And:
“They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one
division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and
cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was
given $6.75 million in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the
interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.”
The Bush team — many of whom were inexperienced Republican Party operatives,
cronies of the president and their twenty-something kids — lost or ripped off
millions of dollars from the UN that was intended to feed Iraq’s poor people:
ORLANDO399 Report This Comment Date: April 16, 2008 06:54PM
Same thing the demo-fags want to do with the illegal immigrants in the
u.s..Whats ur point fagmex?
btw where ya get this from..youtube.lol
Anonymous Report This Comment Date: April 16, 2008 06:57PM
FagMex2000 is wetting his panties cause he knows there's no way a sand-niger or
a dyke-cunt can win....
blinkermann Report This Comment Date: April 16, 2008 10:12PM
This is like some of the hot-chick posts that come along. We have to take their
word for the fact that the chick has a hot body (or that it is not some tranny).
In this case, we have to believe that it is really hot cash under the
burlap.
Showing just a little more would be more exciting.
blinkermann Report This Comment Date: April 16, 2008 10:15PM
And as for ripping off the re-building money . . . as with every war there are
people who make (or take) a few bucks. Some of them are republicans, some are
democrats. Some are corrupt govt employees, some are contractors. Some of them
hid the loot in their pockets, some hide it in the fine print of the contracts.
However you look at it, it is all about the benjamins.
