FEDS TRACK MISSING BILLIONS IN IRAQ AID. US officials think senior military officials and contractors in the Bush administration may have stolen more than $50 bln of the $125 bln sent to Iraq for reconstruction shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, in what could turn out to be "the greatest fraud in US history," Patrick Cockburn reported in the London Independent (2/16). "In one case, auditors working for the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) discovered that $57.8 mln was sent in 'pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills' to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr., who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money," wrote Cockburn. "He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering." The SIGIR report, released 2/2 and entitled "Hard Lessons," concludes that the US reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it, the Washington Post reported (2/2). "Goals shifted from 'liberation' and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004. Many of those projects—over budget, poorly executed or, often, barely begun—were abandoned as security worsened." A bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting ordered by Congress last year is holding public hearings to examine expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan and propose solutions for "systemic" problems. So far there have been 35 convictions for misuse of government funds during the reconstruction of Iraq, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 mln solicited by US military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq. Officials also are finally looking at information given them by Dale Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004, the New York Times reported (2/15). "Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper bags that were scattered in 'dead drops' around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government's presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said," according to the Times.
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