Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority...at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed.
Follow me on a roller coaster down the rabbit hole and learn the answers to the following questions:
- How was it that the CPA came to be above the law?
- How many tons does 12 billion dollars weigh anyway?
- How can a company without a single accountant on staff audit 12 billion dollars in Coalition Provisional Authority expenditures?
- How could anyone could possibly lose 9 billion dollars?
- Are we ever going to find that money?
The answers to all of the questions can be found in the October Vanity Fair, in an article entitled "Billions Over Baghdad" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. Like Matt Taibbi's recent piece in Rolling Stone, it's guaranteed to make you get up and pace a trail around the room, cursing and shaking your head. The Vanity Fair piece is also more thoroughly researched. The entire article is available online.
Fasten your seat belts--here we go:
Fuck, Fuck tha police, we handle it ourselves!
--50 Cent - Don't Need No Help
Step One: create an organization out of thin air that looks, sounds, and smells like an extension of the U.S. government but is accountable to no one.
Confused members of Congress believed that the C.P.A. was a U.S. government agency, which it was not, or that at the very least it had been authorized by the United Nations, which it had not. One congressional funding measure makes reference to the C.P.A. as "an entity of the United States Government"—highly inaccurate. The same congressional measure states that the C.P.A. was "established pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolutions"—just as inaccurate...
Step Two: airlift 363 tons of bills from the New York Federal Reserve to Baghdad.
Step Three: Award a 1.4 million dollar contract to NorthStar Consultants, a company with no accountants on staff and Bahamian Post Office Box for an address, to, to (yeah, I'm stuttering) provide accountant and audit services" to help "in the management and accounting of the Development Fund for Iraq."
Step Four: Start handing out sacks of cash. Be sure to get receipts from the people you give it to, well most of them anyway, and then put your feet up and let the reconstruction of Iraq begin!
Don't worry about what ultimately happens to the money. After all, it belongs to the Iraqi people.
BBC Reporter: "Yes, but the fact is that billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace."
Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah, I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"
--David Oliver, the C.P.A.'s director of management and budget.
Rules? We Don't Need No Stinking Rules!
According to C.P.A. Regulation No. 2, all of the money coming into Iraq was "supposed to be tracked by an 'independent certified public accounting firm.'"
Here's a joke you can tell your friends:
So this guy Bremer was asked if would be upset to know that there were no accountants at NorthStar Consulting. He replied he would be upset, "if it were true."
Get this: Bremer signed C.P.A. order #2! Bwhahahahahahahah
Although NorthStar Consulting operated out of a house in La Jolla, California, its mailing address was, get this, P.O. Box N-3813 in Nassau, Bahamas. It's a particularly portentous address:
Box N-3813, it turns out, has been the locus for all sorts of transactions by Americans and others looking to move money offshore. In addition to Howell's NorthStar, this particular box also served as the address of record for a man named Patrick Thomson and for his Bahamian business called Lions Gate Management. Both figured prominently in one of the more spectacular offshore frauds in recent years, the collapse of Evergreen Security.
Oh-oh!
Who knew? Who could anticipate? Everything changed after 9-11.
Step Five: Immunity, immunity, immunity (very important).
Before Bremer left, after an orgy of spending in the final three months of the C.P.A., he issues an order "declaring that all coalition-force members 'shall be immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States.'"
Now that ain't working, that's the way you do it!
And there you have it, a cook's tour of a wonderful and provocative piece of reporting by two talented investigative journalists at Vanity Fair. There's lots of good parts I left out. Read the whole thing (and weep) online. Forward it to your friends and representatives. Write a letter to Vanity Fair to thank them doing such a great job and for making the article available online.
One eloquent final thought from the authors:
One simple piece of data puts this into perspective: to date, America has spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan—an industrialized country three times Iraq's size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.
Good night, and good luck!