oversight.house.govThe House Oversight Committee began a series of hearings this past week regarding the decisions made thus far in the Iraqi reconstruction. Like most things that take place in our illustrious government, you could have watched the proceedings on C-SPAN, but that’s about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
I’ve found that you can pick up transcripts to just about anything online these days. If you want entertaining reading, locate one of these on any sort of government hearing and skim through it. The things they uncover are insane.
On Wednesday they discussed fraud, waste and abuse in federal spending, specifically in regards to Iraq. The chairman of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (CA), informed us that over the course of approximately one year, from May 2003-2004, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York sent nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq. This money was designated to aid in the reconstruction efforts in the country. He goes into great detail to describe how this money was sent, just so we get a crystal clear picture how much $12 billion is:
‘To do that, the Federal Reserve had to pack 281 million individual bills — including more than 107 million $100 bills — onto wooden pallets to be shipped to Iraq. The cash weighed more than 363 tons and was loaded onto C-130 cargo planes to be flown into Baghdad. The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they’re true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that’s exactly what our government did.’
That last statement is exactly what’s been running through my head ever since I first heard this news story. Who approved the sending of $12 billion to Iraq, and more importantly, why weren’t we told about it? The obvious answer is that the president and Congress approved this spending, but a lot of people must have missed the 6 o’clock news the day that that was announced because I’m pretty sure there would have been an uprising the next day.
The next pressing issue, and the reason the Oversight Committee brought this to our attention, is what happened to our $12 billion? One would assume with that amount of money we could do a whole lot of reconstructing in Iraq. Well, the sad truth is that no one is really sure where the money went. We don’t know. The Coalition Provisional Authority doesn’t know. The Iraqis don’t even know.
How could this be, you might ask? Well, the answer is shockingly simple. At the time the money began arriving in Iraq, there were no reliable accounting practices in place. It just boggles my mind that we handed over even $1 billion at a time to a quasi-government with no standardized accounting. The tales from first-hand witnesses are terrifying enough.
It’s like a whole country run by guys who sell merchandise that fell from the back of a truck. There was everything from duffel bags of shrink wrapped $100 bills to a vault key in an unsecured backpack, and even cash payments being made from the back of a pickup.
By far the worst is the admitting of an Iraqi official that he was given $6.75 million and ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.
Stories like that make me wonder even more what kind of corrupt government we are supporting and supposedly helping to get on its feet. If we had just been told that they simply used poor accounting practices, we would just assume that Sharif over in accounting is doing a bad job. But when you hear the real stories of ‘ghost employees’ getting paychecks and duffel bags full of cash, you realize that there is a serious problem that no one told us about.
I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I’ve decided that the one thing that would make me feel better about this story is to see Condoleeza Rice sit in front of the House Oversight Committee trying to explain how this happened and why exactly it wasn’t her fault. As you know, I enjoy seeing her in front of panels, so even if she had no explanation, it would be funny.
Until next week, I’ll be here watching out for my duffel bag of cash, bro!