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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (126061)	12/2/2009 11:38:54 AM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 542970

If only it were a mere $billion Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled. vanityfair.com A lot of that occurred in the last months of the CPA: By the spring of 2004 the clock was winding down for L. Paul Bremer and the C.P.A. Within several months—on June 30—the Authority was scheduled to turn government operations over to the Iraqis, at least formally. There was palpable anxiety among officials and contractors about what would happen under the new Iraqi regime, and they launched an aggressive effort to get as much money into the pipeline as possible. On April 26, another shipment of cash-laden pallets, this one holding $750 million, arrived at Baghdad International Airport. On May 18 the Fed made a $1 billion shipment, which was followed on June 22 by the biggest single shipment ever made by the Fed anywhere—$2.4 billion. Another $1.6 billion arrived three days later, bringing the total of cash shipments to Iraq to $5 billion in the C.P.A.'s final three months. Just astonishing.