The Spoils of War: Billions Over Baghdad (30 tons of Taxpayer $$$ loaded into tractor-trailers)

[kpete]

Is stealing public money the real reason for invasion?
oversight

The Spoils of War: Billions Over Baghdad

War is wrong in more than one way. This story is excerpted from Vanity Fair (October 2007 Edition) where the authors, the only journalists in history to have won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards, are contributing editors.

By Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele

Ten miles west of Manhattan in New Jersey stands a fortress-like building behind an iron fence. In East Rutherford at 100 Orchard Street, it is the largest repository of American currency in the world. EROC (East Rutherford Operations Center) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is where the bank processes checks, makes wire transfers, and receives and ships out paper money.

An immense three-story cavern known as the currency vault, with storage space to rival a Wal-Mart's, can hold upwards of $60 billion in cash. Few human beings are allowed in; a robotic system, immune to human temptation, handles everything.

One day, forty pallets of cash, weighing 30 tons, were loaded in a tractor-trailer which drove to Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, DC. There the seals on the truck were broken, and the cash was off-loaded and counted by Treasury Department personnel. The money was transferred to a C-130 transport plane. The next day, it arrived in Baghdad.

That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion cash was airlifted to Baghdad.

more:
http://www.progress.org/2007/brltstel.htm
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Progress-Report-Is-steali-by-Scott-Baker-100301-664.html

[gratuitous]

1. Bartlett and Steele have been following the money for years

They tracked down, pre-internet days, a whole bunch of provisions in the 1986 tax code overhaul and determined that there were specific provisions written to benefit or exempt (for example) an heiress to an estate in Dallas. These guys get the goods.

[BeFree]

4. It is good to be king, eh? Or, queen.

[conscious evolution]

2. K&R

Follow the money.

[pleah]

3. K&R