Where Has All The Money Gone?

[liadnan]

Ed Harriman in the LRB on the audit trail in Iraq. Fascinating and disspiriting reading. (Open access while this is the current issue.)

The ‘financial irregularities’ described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated, handing out truckloads of dollars for which neither they nor the recipients felt any need to be accountable. The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.

Comments

[nikandra.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. Interesting reading. But... I'm not very surprised, to tell you the truth.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Yikes. I wish that made slightly less fascinating reading.

I started browsing UK news sources during the mid-1990s, to offset what I saw locally. When do I get to read US news about US-related topics again and, you know, trust that something vaguely like "coverage" and "research" have been done? I doubt that the LRB article would see print here in that form. Perhaps the utility of a how-others-see-us POV is true for other entities as well, but it feels particularly acute now in the US.

(Your Glastonbury post was fascinating too, though happily less catastrophic. That's a lot of weather.)