Lawmaker: U.S. sent giant pallets of cash into Iraq

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/iraq.cash.reut/index.html

Lawmaker: U.S. sent giant pallets of cash into Iraq

Story Highlights
• The Federal Reserve sent over $4 billion in cash to Iraq in 2003 and 2004
• Cash, weighing 363 tons, loaded on to pallets and flown on military aircraft
• Funds came from Iraqi oil exports, Saddam Hussein regime's frozen assets
• U.S. administrator denies funds were diverted to the insurgency

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said Tuesday.

The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.

Bills weighing a total of 363 tons were loaded onto military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Watch Democrats put the former top U.S. official in Iraq on the spotVideo)

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

On December 12, 2003, $1.5 billion was shipped to Iraq, initially "the largest pay out of U.S. currency in Fed history," according to an e-mail cited by committee members.

It was followed by more than $2.4 billion on June 22, 2004, and $1.6 billion three days later. The CPA turned over sovereignty on June 30.
Bremer: Cash requested by Iraqis

L. Paul Bremer, who as the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq after initial combat operations ended, said the enormous shipments were done at the request of the Iraqi minister of finance.

"He said, 'I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi government expenses for the first couple of months after we are sovereign. We won't have the mechanisms in place, I won't know how to get the money here,"' Bremer said.

"So these shipments were made at the explicit request of the Iraqi minister of finance to forward fund government expenses, a perfectly, seems to me, legitimate use of his money," Bremer told lawmakers.

Democrats led by Waxman also questioned whether the lack of oversight of $12 billion in Iraqi money that was disbursed by Bremer and the CPA somehow enabled insurgents to get their hands on the funds, possibly through falsifying names on the government payroll.

"I have no knowledge of monies being diverted. I would certainly be concerned if I thought they were," Bremer said. He pointed out that the problem of fake names on the payroll existed before the U.S.-led invasion. (Watch Waxman outline questions and Bremer respondVideo)

The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, said in a January 2005 report that $8.8 billion was unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries.

"We were in the middle of a war, working in very difficult conditions, and we had to move quickly to get this Iraqi money working for the Iraqi people," Bremer told lawmakers. He said there was no banking system and it would have been impossible to apply modern accounting standards in the midst of a war.

Republicans argued that Bremer and the CPA staff did the best they could under the circumstances and accused Democrats of trying to score political points over the increasingly unpopular Iraq war.

"We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive," said Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican.

Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/iraq.cash.reut/index.html

Link to video of the House Oversight Committee Hearings regarding the above story:

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/us/2007/02/06/koppel.where.cash.cnn

Saw the news story on NBC.

Although not a fan of the standard "media", it was and is clear that this is yet another major crime by our govt. They say it was from oil profits ... actually it was cash from the US treasury supposedly offset by their oil profits. The money was dumped here and there by the pallet full. A total disregard for the US taxpayer or our economy ........ what the blazes are we doing "creating" the Iraqi economy by sending Billions (or tons) of cash over there?

Our very own government is insane and our enemy (on many fronts).

Our own government puts border agents in prison for chasing a drug smuggler and rewards the smuggler ....

A republican Gov., by executive order, takes control of millions of young girls by ordering them to have dangerous unneeded vaccinations (do the research --- its only been tested on 2000 kids with over 100 serious reactions - see Barbara Simpson at WND) ........

I could go on. As MANY here have said .....ITS OVER, WE ARE FINISHED. The rot runs deeper than any of us really know.

narnia4 said:

Saw the news story on NBC.

Although not a fan of the standard "media", it was and is clear that this is yet another major crime by our govt. They say it was from oil profits ... actually it was cash from the US treasury supposedly offset by their oil profits. The money was dumped here and there by the pallet full. A total disregard for the US taxpayer or our economy ........ what the blazes are we doing "creating" the Iraqi economy by sending Billions (or tons) of cash over there?

Our very own government is insane and our enemy (on many fronts).

Our own government puts border agents in prison for chasing a drug smuggler and rewards the smuggler ....

A republican Gov., by executive order, takes control of millions of young girls by ordering them to have dangerous unneeded vaccinations (do the research --- its only been tested on 2000 kids with over 100 serious reactions - see Barbara Simpson at WND) ........

I could go on. As MANY here have said .....ITS OVER, WE ARE FINISHED. The rot runs deeper than any of us really know.

Click to expand...

It's finished unless something major happens right quick to get the country back to the way it SHOULD BE. But that's work...... ho hum.

Please just send me one pallet!

Keep working everyone! Our gov't wants your money!

Im no expert in economics but this article seems to state that it belonged to the Iraqi people.

Rams, I would like to agree with you. But there is so much doubt and suspicion in my mind on the going ons of Iraq and our border.

I think we fell into the rabbit hole.

The queen of hearts is going to ask for offing our heads next.

$12 Billion in cash to Iraq vanishes! Must read!

Notice you dont see this in any American news outlets.....the loss of over 12 BILLION due to fraud, theft, and mismanagement. Astounding. Withdraw now. What a pathetic waste of our money.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2008189,00.html

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish


Special flights brought in tonnes of banknotes which disappeared into the war zone

David Pallister
Thursday February 8, 2007
The Guardian

An armed guard poses beside pallets of $100 bills in Baghdad
An armed guard poses beside pallets of $100 bills in Baghdad. Almost $12bn in cash was spent by the US-led authority


The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

The memorandum details the casual manner in which the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbursed the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.

"One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills," the memorandum says. "One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

"They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division's vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75m in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds."

The minutes from a May 2004 CPA meeting reveal "a single disbursement of $500m in security funding labelled merely 'TBD', meaning 'to be determined'."

The memorandum concludes: "Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste ... thousands of 'ghost employees' were receiving pay cheques from Iraqi ministries under the CPA's control. Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States."

According to Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, the $8.8bn funds to Iraqi ministries were disbursed "without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for". But, according to the memorandum, "he now believes that the lack of accountability and transparency extended to the entire $20bn expended by the CPA".

To oversee the expenditure the CPA was supposed to appoint an independent certified public accounting firm. "Instead the CPA hired an obscure consulting firm called North Star Consultants Inc. The firm was so small that it reportedly operates out of a private home in San Diego." Mr Bowen found that the company "did not perform a review of internal controls as required by the contract".

However, evidence before the committee suggests that senior American officials were unconcerned about the situation because the billions were not US taxpayers' money. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, reminded the committee that "the subject of today's hearing is the CPA's use and accounting for funds belonging to the Iraqi people held in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq. These are not appropriated American funds. They are Iraqi funds. I believe the CPA discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people."

Bremer's financial adviser, retired Admiral David Oliver, is even more direct. The memorandum quotes an interview with the BBC World Service. Asked what had happened to the $8.8bn he replied: "I have no idea. I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it's important."

Q: "But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace."

Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"

Mr Bremer, whose disbanding of the Iraqi armed forces and de-Ba'athification programme have been blamed as contributing to the present chaos, told the committee: "I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that with the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently. Our top priority was to get the economy moving again. The first step was to get money into the hands of the Iraqi people as quickly as possible."

Millions of civil service families had not received salaries or pensions for months and there was no effective banking system. "It was not a perfect solution," he said. "Delay might well have exacerbated the nascent insurgency and thereby increased the danger to Americans."

Thanks for posting the additional article, Truthsearch. That adds a bit more information to the story.

Bump

Bremer's financial adviser, retired Admiral David Oliver, is even more direct. The memorandum quotes an interview with the BBC World Service. Asked what had happened to the $8.8bn he replied: "I have no idea. I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it's important."

Q: "But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace."

Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"

Click to expand...

It sounds as if they did not care in the slightest what happened to the money. Sounds like they just wanted it on record that they returned the money of the Iraqi government back to them.

I wonder how many sticky fingers got their hands on that money?

On the bright side, at least we now know where a lot of the money comes from thats funding the various insurgencies.

U.S. gives money to Iraqi. Iraqi takes money to local Iraqi Imam and is given SA-7 SAM. Iraqi shoots down U.S. helicopter with 7 aboard. A consternated U.S., miffed about its lack of success in Iraq, then decides to get serious about solving problem and gives even more money to Iraqi.

Great job there, Bushie!

Actually, Truthsearch, ABC carried this story earlier this week.

Texas Writer said:

Actually, Truthsearch, ABC carried this story earlier this week.

Click to expand...

You'll note that the lead article is from CNN, as well.

What ho.......are the sheeple starting to look up..........it took a videotape to show many what has been stated over & over & over..........CROOKS..........

This is just an added piece.....part of an article at WMR

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/


Blackwater is under investigation by Chairman Henry Waxman's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for being improperly awarded a $20 million security subcontract by Halliburton. The Army later forced Halliburton to return the money but after Tina Ballard, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Policy and Procurement denied that Blackwater was doing security work for Halliburton. On February 7, Ballard reversed herself and admitted that Blackwater performed security subcontract work for Halliburton. The Halliburton/Blackwater malfeasance occurred when Schmitz and Lewis were acting in tandem in the Pentagon's Inspector General's office to cover up major contract fraud involving Halliburton, Blackwater, and dozens of other firms, including "private military companies," otherwise known as mercenaries.

Tons of cash in Iraq kicked around like footballs in Iraq and Paul Bremer still walks a free man with a Presidential Freedom Medal.

The Blackwater/Halliburton revelations came after L. Paul Bremer, the former U.S. viceroy admitted that $9 billion in cash drawn from the vaults of the U.S. Federal Reserve and sent to his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) went missing, in part, because "ghost employees" had to be paid to "keep the peace." There were 363 tons of cash on 484 pallets that could fill 17 semi-trailers. Although Bremer and Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector for Iraqi Reconstruction, maintained that the "ghost employees" were Iraqis, Custer Battles, the GOP-linked firm that has been under investigation for fraud, secretly shipped $12 million in cash to Beirut on what was called its "Flying Carpet Airline." CPA official Frank Willis stated that there was so much cash at the CPA, Americans were "playing football" with it.