Also found in the Calamity Howler today, a stab at the Presidential
Metal of Freedom winner.
I must remind readers that when they get to the fifth paragraph, the
Pentagon, since Sept. 10/01, is still missing either $3.2 or $2.3
trillion, depending on whether or not Rumsfeld is talking about it -- no
paper trail or heads rolling! Galloway must have forgotten.
Natalia
WHEN WILL MEDIA DEEPLY PROBE CORRUPTION IN IRAQ CONTRACTS ???
By Joseph L. Galloway Tribune Media Services
February 7, 2007
BAYSIDE, Texas --- Show me the money, or at least some receipts
scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and grocery bags.
This week, we were treated to the spectacle of the former U.S. civilian
overlord of Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, squirming in the hot seat
as he attempted with little success to explain what he did with 363 TONS
of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad.
That's $12 billion in cold, hard American cash, and no one, especially
Bremer, seems to know where it went.
It may be an urban legend, but the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, the
Illinois Republican, is widely quoted as saying: "A billion here, a
billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." If he didn't
say it, he should have.
Bremer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role
in totally screwing up the first two years of the Iraq Occupation, said
that a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi
government to meet payrolls that were patently fraudulent. The
Department of Defense's special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart
Bowen, said that a 2005 audit he conducted found that in some ministries
the payroll was padded with up to 90% "ghost employees" --- people who
didn't really work there or perhaps didn't really exist.
Bremer said that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls,
even though he knew they were bogus, for fear of starting riots and
demonstrations among the Iraqis, real and imagined. After all, the
former czar told the representatives, it wasn't really our money anyway.
It was Iraqi money --- oil earnings and bank accounts seized from Saddam
Hussein's government --- that we were holding in trust.
I can think of no period in American history when we sat idly by while
$12 billion just disappeared, poof, without a paper trail; without heads
rolling; without someone going to prison. And all this was happening at
a time in the war when American soldiers and Marines were going without
properly armored vehicles, without lifesaving body armor and even
without some of the weapons they needed.
What does it take for the American people's gag reflex to kick in? When
do we begin to realize that this is only the tip of an iceberg of fraud,
waste, abuse and corruption perpetrated on a monumental scale by the
Bush administration, its buddies among the military contractors and
their handmaidens on Capitol Hill?
The cost of this war is swiftly building toward a trillion dollars. How
much of that was siphoned off by crooked and incompetent contractors,
greedy defense corporations and Iraqi crooks in a government that we
created and installed? No one in the congressional hearing has yet asked
Bremer or the inspector general how much of that $12 billion in cash was
handed out to American contractors in Baghdad, although that question
begs to be asked and answered.
During the dark days of World War II, Congress established a Committee
on War Profiteering and put a little-known senator from Missouri, Harry
S. Truman, in charge. Truman, a veteran of combat service in World War
I, was a bulldog. His committee went after not only those who stole
money but also those who provided shoddy or worthless equipment and
supplies for our troops. He had the power to shut down an offending
company or contractor, and he used it.
Where's our Truman Committee today? Where are the righteous
representatives of the people charged with standing guard over our
troops and our money?
We've wasted $600 billion on a war that we're losing, day by bloody day,
at a time when our president presents a federal budget that cuts
Medicare to find billions for more that war. The Decider boasts that if
we do things his way, America's wealthiest individuals won't have to pay
even one dollar more in taxes. Meanwhile, the people's representatives,
on both sides of the aisle, round up the contributions they need for
re-election by putting themselves in the pockets of the very robber
barons they're supposed to be investigating, interrogating and policing.
Perhaps we should let a no-bid cost-plus contract to Halliburton to
construct large additions to the country club federal prisons to
accommodate a population explosion in the years ahead. Or, for
convenience sake, maybe we could just add a prison wing to the $500
million George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas.
JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY is the legendary retired war correspondent and
co-author of "When We Were Soldiers Once...and Young." His column is
distributed via Tribune Media Services.
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