All that fuckin' cash, just gone ...

[ThomWV]

I was watching a hearing on C-Span this morning when a Democratic Congressman related a story. It seems this guy had been in Iraq about the time Saddam was captured and he was heading back home. For whatever reason his flight was delayed and he and some others ended up spending a couple of hours 'on the tarmac' waiting to go. During that time a cargo flight came in, a C-130 or something, and he said they were trying to keep secrete from him what was on it. He found our however. It was $1.8 Billion in cash, 6 pallets of neatly stacked hundreds is how I believe he described it. Reconstruction money; but now there's nothing reconstructed, the cash is all gone, and not one god dam record to show how this came to be the case.

I know this isn't possible. Isn't it a god dam shame that the good Congressman couldn't have just snatched up a couple of those pallets and took the money back home to spend on his shitball state's schools, or roads, or old farts care, or maybe just a new-business startup fund - who knows? Just think how much good could have been done with that money. What did we get instead? Not one god dam thing, all that fuckin' cash, just gone.

[AuntPatsy]

1. Send it to the msm perhaps they will do a real journalistic investigation

regarding all the lost billions of dollars supposedly sent for Iraq...

I just know we can rely on good old American journalist to demand the truth for the citizens of this country this being such a huge story considering...

:sarcasm:

[mtnester]

3. I got a bridge to sell to ANYONE who thinks that will work

maybe we can get some of the money back that way

(I am in the EXACT same sarcasm region you are there my friend)

[KansDem]

4. Years ago I would have agreed, but this mob of bimbo-urinalists will only cover this up.

As far as I'm concerned, they are partially responsible. They aided and abetted the Bushistas in committing crimes from election fraud to US intelligence outings; from illegal invasions of sovereign nations to climate change denials.

The media is complicit.

[KansDem]

2. That's 363 *tons* of cash...

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.

--more-- (oh, so much more...)
Guardain

But we can't afford to pay for health care for our children!

[Ezlivin]

5. It was great for pick-up games of football. Go deep and I'll lob a few grand your way!

"Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money," says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. "We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced."

The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. "American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone," says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. "In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did." The Guardian

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

6. That is so much money,...money that could have actually HELPED people.

Instead, it disappeared with no indication it was utilized as it was supposed to be.

I truly understand your anger/disgust.

It's unbelievable, to me, more Americans aren't raising almighty hell over the loss of not merely that $$$BILLION but also all the other tens of $$$BILLIONS lost *LOL* fucking LOST down some black hole,...just, disappeared, supposedly.

Literally, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of millions of dollars gone missing. How is that possible? It is NOT possible.

[TransitJohn]

7. I get tired of all the stories of what's wrong over there.

Won't somebody for once report on what's going right??
:sarcasm:

[burythehatchet]

8. The cash it not "gone"

it is being put to good use right now to enable the continuing march to fascism. Fascism ain't free, It takes money ya know.

[catmandu57]

9. 1.8 BILLION

and that was just a small part of all the money now gone walkabout. If we had taken that money and used it here, how many homes could have put in a personal solar power plant, how far would that have gone to free us from the middle east teat and cleansed the environment.
How many roads, bridges, schools, clinics, how much healthcare, instead I imagine it has found it's way into the accounts of the have mores, to sit mouldering and collecting interest until eternity falls away.