363 Tons
I can feel pretty jaded, worn down even, by stupendous, jaw-dropping political revelations which arrive with such machine-gun speed that there's no time or energy left for one's jaw to drop.
But, this story managed it.
It begins with the release of a report from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his Minority Office of the Committee on Government Reform called "U.S. Mismanaged Iraqi Funds"; he's about to hold hearings (scheduled for yesterday, but I haven't looked for the outcome yet). The report is about all those billions of dollars lost in Iraq by US officials in the early days of the occupation amidst confusion over administratin of the Oil for Food program, the Development Fund for Iraq ("DFI"), and Halliburton's egregious overcharging for importing gasoline into Iraq (>$200 million), among other comedies of graft and corruption.
We have heard about the misplaced, unaccounted-for billions that were part of the DFI. Amazing and jaw-dropping business as usual. Yeah, so familiar from Enron-type tales; one hardly thinks about the underhanded accounting done with a flick of the metaphorical pen to alter the books and hide another billion or two.
I read and realized that my mental image of the "accounting fraud" in Iraq was not quite right. What really made my jaw hit the floor was this statement:
In total, nearly $12 billion in cash was withdrawn from the DFI account at the Federal Reserve–the largest cash withdrawals in history. The Administration transferred from New York to Baghdad more than 281 million individual currency notes on 484 pallets weighing a total of 363 tons. This included more than 107 million $100 bills.
Can you believe that! 363 tons of cash! (Just guess how much — by weight! — ended up in Halliburton's corporate hands.)
That's incredible enough, but to top it off:
In late June 2004 � in the last week of its existence � the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority ordered the urgent delivery of more than $4 billion, including the largest one-day transfer in the history of the Federal Reserve — a single shipment of $2.4 billion in cash.
With so much cash arriving in Iraq, you might think that extensive precautions would be taken to account for the funds. But exactly the opposite happened: U.S. officials used virtually no financial controls to safeguard the Iraqi funds. No certified public accounting firm was hired to monitor disbursements, and auditors found that U.S. officials could not account for billions of dollars.
One former CPA official told us that Iraq was awash in $100 bills. One contractor received a $2 million cash payment in a duffel bag — other cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck — and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices.
The records are so lacking that it�s impossible to know the full extent of the waste, fraud, and abuse that occurred during the period of U.S. control. But what we do know is alarming.
[…]
Alarming! It takes my breath away, it does.