Who needs pics of Bush & Abramoff when you got Bush & Bremer?

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Sunday January 29, 2006 · 2:12 PM PST

2006/01/29 · 14:12

Sunday, a U.S. government audit reported that the Coalition Provisional Government-led occupation authorities lost "tens of millions of dollars" allocated for the rebuilding of Iraq through waste and fraud:

Dryly written audit reports describe the Coalition Provisional Authority's offices [led by Paul Bremer, left, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom] in the south-central city of Hillah being awash in bricks of $100 bills taken from a central vault without documentation.
It describes one agent who kept almost $700,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker and mentions a U.S. soldier who gambled away as much as $60,000 in reconstruction funds in the Philippines.
"Tens of millions of dollars in cash had gone in and out of the South-Central Region vault without any tracking of who deposited or withdrew the money, and why it was taken out," says a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is in the midst of a series of audits for the Pentagon and State Department.

The Republican culture of corruption was, and is, business as usual.

And, BTW, "tens of millions?" It is far, far worse than that:

Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier's name or provide a good description of him.
Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork. One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag. Three-quarters of a million dollars was stolen from an office safe, and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it "before the Iraqis take over." Nearly $5 billion was shipped from New York in the last month of the CPA. Sources suggest that a deliberate attempt was being made to run down the balance and spend the money while the CPA still had authority and before an Iraqi government could be formed.

The culture of corruption is just Republicans' business as usual.

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