Gop Fiscal Honesty Myth Shattered- $billions Lost In Iraq

GOP Fiscal Honesty Myth Shattered- $Billions Lost in Iraq … disinformation at the highest levels.

Bush says news is being “filtered”, but, his complaint really is that reporters refuse to be good public relations for the White House!

When the Inspector General for the Defense Department recently released a 69-page audit to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform criticizing the ‘reckless at best’, accounting practices by the Pentagon of the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation that couldn’t rationally account for almost $15 Billion worth of goods and services ranging from trucks, bottled water and mattresses to rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns that were bought from contractors in the Iraq reconstruction effort. You would think the American People would be outraged and in the streets immediately protesting, or at the very least contacting their congressman demanding a better explanation of how $15 billion just vanished without a clue.

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone”? — Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. The Defense Department spent $1.8 billion of seized Iraqi assets with “absolutely no accountability” also according to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), who chairs the oversight committee. This untraceable cash supposedly was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has just gone missing, unaccounted for, or plain disappeared in a template of proposed mismanagement and/or greed..

This all came under renewed scrutiny in a new Pentagon report, “Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt” .
Auditors were not even able to find a comprehensible set of records to explain $134.8 million in payments by the U.S. military to its allies (4,000 from the UK, 2,000 from Georgia, 900 from Poland, 650 from South Korea and 2,357 from all other nations), in the Iraq war.
“It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid,” said Rep. Henry Waxman. “This report is further documentation of the fact that the United States had absolutely no preparation to use contracting on the scale that it needed either at the military or aid level in going to war in Iraq,” said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

After a power struggle with the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon won control over most of the aid package for Iraq, and the rebuilding management of much of the 2,300 construction projects awarded in 2004.

More fodder is created when former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan claims ignorance (Paul Bremer had to testify before Congress and was asked directly about those missing billions. It’s been the subject of very high-level investigations. There is a huge paper trail) to Federal Reserve involvement of the cash deliveries from the New York Branch of the Federal Reserve system when questioned on Democracy Now by host Amy Goodman … AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, when you were head of the Federal Reserve, how much knowledge do you have of this? And did you investigate this? Were you aware of this at the time?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me say that what we were involved in was essentially endeavoring to create a viable currency for the central bank of Iraq. And what we did do was—I think very successfully—create what is a viable financial system, even under the circumstances that currently exist.

Alan Greenspan

The U.S. economy’s weakness was concealed by the Federal Reserve, which pumped in liquidity, and by regulators that looked away as loans were handed out well beyond borrowers’ ability to repay them.

As if on cue from the White House, almost ceremoniously, the Army has disagreed with some of the Pentagon auditor’s findings, saying that it is difficult to maintain an adequate paper trail in a war zone and that it has improved its record-keeping and accountability efforts. Geez … it’s time people who care about their tax dollars get active and demand a better explanation. By god these military personnel are supposedly adults and as role model reasonable parents we all would question our children until we got satisfactory answers - we need to do the same to our leaders to make ABSOLUTELY clear that this won’t happen again. No way should they be let off the hook with their flimsy explanation. There is some hope though as auditors did refer more than two dozen vouchers, totaling $35 million, to criminal investigators at the Pentagon. This is a glaring 95% failure rate in basic accounting standards, according to the Pentagon report.

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“Investigators examined 53 payment vouchers and couldn’t find even one that adequately explained where the money went” Waxman said.

All $100 bills delivered from Federal Reserve Bank of New York between April 2003-June 2004

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Robert L. Wilkie, assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, declined an invitation to testify before Waxman’s House Committee… so why doesn’t Waxman extend a serious invitation - like a subpoena ?

Members of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

Democrats

Republicans

• Rep. Tom Davis, Virginia, Ranking Minority Member
• Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana
• Rep. Christopher Shays, Connecticut
• Rep. John M. McHugh, New York
• Rep. John L. Mica, Florida
• Rep. Mark E. Souder, Indiana
• Rep. Todd Russell Platts, Pennsylvania
• Rep. Chris Cannon, Utah
• Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee
• Rep. Michael Turner, Ohio
• Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California
• Rep. Kenny Marchant, Texas
• Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, Georgia
• Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina
• Rep. Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
• Rep. Brian Bilbray, California
• Rep. Bill Sali, Idaho
• Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio

The $12 billion in cash was delivered to Iraq in Lockheed C-130 Hercules cargo planes.

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Actual cash on a pallet shipped to Iraq from Federal Reserve
operations center - 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, NY

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Auditors said that none of the files reviewed “contained sufficient supporting documentation to provide reasonable assurance that these funds were used for their intended purpose.” Furthermore, the Defense Department did not know “what equipment is due in, due out, issued and on hand.” Another $5 billion spent on supporting the Iraqi security forces could not be properly traced, according to a November 2007 inspector general report. The Pentagon to date has been appropriated $492 billion to support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the US Army has made more than 180,000 commercial payments from bases in Iraq alone, Egypt and Kuwait from 2001 to 2006, according to Pentagon Auditor Mary Ugone. In April, a separate audit of US-funded reconstruction projects for Iraq found that millions of dollars had been wasted because hundreds of schemes were never even completed, but paid for in full.

The Iraq occupation is running $12 billion a month — $16 billion if you include Afghanistan !

U.S. Spends $5,000 per Second - in 2008 (per Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on May 5, 2008) The Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq - $390,000 . Don’t forget the 180,000+ private contractors in Iraq in August 2007, supporting the U.S. Army Troops.
The surprising escalating cost of the 2 wars has vastly diminished spending on virtually all other discretionary federal programs, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal aid to states and cities, all of which have been scaled back significantly since the invasion of Iraq. And this comes at a time when the United States has more people enrolled in the “Food Stamps” program than any other time in the nations history.

Some visual scale to the enormous amount of $100 bills in $1 billion - compared to $12 billion total -

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An earlier audit by the inspector general found deficiencies in accounting for $5.2 billion of U.S. payments to buy weapons, trucks, generators and other equipment for Iraq’s security forces. “Without a receiving report and invoice, we don’t know what we paid for” said Mary Ugone, the Defense Department’s deputy inspector general for auditing. She said internal controls and paper trails were inadequate and that the Army’s “finance personnel were not adequately trained” in overseeing the billions of dollars paid. Knight-Ridder, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been reporting GAO accounting discrepancies for the Iraq war since late June of 2004.

“Investigators looked at 53 payment vouchers and couldn’t find even one that adequately explained where the money went,” Waxman said. Waxman waited patiently until this audit report was released to present his “clean contracting” amendment to the House version of the Defense Authorization bill.

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Classic Example of Military Contractor Recklessness -

The American contractor needing the gunnysack was a company called Custer Battles. The name was derived not from Little Big Horn but from the names of the company’s owners, Scott K. Custer and Michael J. Battles. Both were former army rangers in their mid-30s, and Battles also had once been a C.I.A. operative. The pair showed up on the streets of Baghdad with the blessing of the White House at invasion’s end, looking for a way to do business. At the time, the only American civilians who could gain access to the city were those approved by President Bush’s staff. The Battles half of the team brought the White House access, secured when Michael Battles became the G.O.P.-backed candidate in the 2002 Rhode Island congressional primary for the privilege of losing to the Democratic incumbent, Patrick Kennedy. Battles not only lost the primary but was fined by the Federal Election Commission for misrepresenting campaign contributions.

The Coalition Provisional Authority - C.P.A. awarded Custer and Battles one of its first no-bid contracts—$16.5 million to protect civilian aircraft flights, of which at the time there were few, into Baghdad International Airport. The company faced immediate obstacles: Custer and Battles didn’t have any money, they didn’t have a viable business, and they didn’t have any employees. Bremer’s C.P.A. had overlooked these shortcomings and forked over $2 million anyway, in cash, to get them started, simply ignoring long-standing requirements that the government certify that a contractor has the capacity to fulfill a contract. That first $2 million cash infusion was followed shortly by a second. Over the next year Custer Battles would secure more than $100 million in Iraq contracts.

The House version of the Defense Authorization bill amended contains provisions majority Democrats say would impose greater transparency and accountability on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It links future U.S. spending on reconstruction to Iraqi government contributions, seeks greater oversight of and controls on private contractors, and more oversight of U.S. provincial reconstruction teams. The White House has already threatened to veto the bill because of several other provisions, including the more than $700 billion shaved from missile defense efforts.

“When it comes to Iraq, it appears that money is no object for President Bush,” said the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W West Virginia and the longest serving living Congressman of both Congressional Chambers. “Yet when it comes to important priorities here at home, he turns into Ebeneezer Scrooge.”

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Emotional exchanges occurred over Democrat Barbara Lee’s amendment, but was approved 234 to 183 nevertheless, to require that any agreement committing the United States to defend Iraq from internal or external threats be a treaty subject to congressional approval.

President Bush has threatened a veto of the House measure, with a White House statement raising objections to numerous provisions, including those dealing with future U.S. agreements with Iraq. The White House has strongly opposed amendments requiring video recording of all intelligence interrogations, and barring contractors from conducting interrogations. The Senate is expected to debate its own version of the 2009 Defense Authorization bill in June 08′.

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On 20 March 2003, the United States launched a war against Iraq, with President Bush saying the attack was to “disarm Iraq and to free its people”, after he and his aides made 935 false statements in the run-up to war - like Vice President Dick Cheney declaring www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=complete_timeline_of_the_ 2003_invasion_of_iraq_121 ” target=”_blank” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview (’/outbound/www.cooperativeresearch.org’);”>Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), that must be countered, according to the non-profit group - The Center for Public Integrity.

So what if the Iraq invasion and occupation (war), has cost the American People 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted. Bush’s White House estimated $60 billion to finance the Iraq campaign, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen. The Iraq invasion and occupation cost the US something like $3 trillion U.S. dollars ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $50-$60-billion predicted in 2003 and which sum was argued vigorously and wrongly in the 2004 Presidential debates by George W. Bush with U.S. Senator John Kerry.

The Iraq war was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to the former World Bank vice-president and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. How - The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit. “The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system,” … The Iraq war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, the Columbia Business School Professor Joseph Stiglitz stated.

7 out of 10 Americans think government spending on the war in Iraq is partly responsible for the economic troubles in the United States, according to results of a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted March 15-16 08′
Sixty-one percent of those polled said the next president should remove most U.S. troops from Iraq “within a few months of taking office.”
Only 36 percent of those polled said the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over — down from 68 percent in March 2003, when the war began.
The poll surveyed 1,019 adult Americans from March 14 to 16.

President Bush, speaking on NBC’s “Today” in April, disputed the notion that the war was negatively affecting the economy.
“I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs … because we’re buying equipment and people are working,” he said. “I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy’s adjusting.”

The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world…
Just a few days’ funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered - Joseph Stiglitz

One of the greatest discrepancies is that the official figures do not include the long-term health care and social benefits for injured servicemen, who are surviving previously fatal attacks because of improved body armour.
“The ratio of injuries to fatalities in a normal war is 2:1. In this war they admitted to 7:1 but a true number is (something) like 15:1.”

Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate “baloney.” Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on “Nightline” that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns.

If it were not for some courageous American patriots (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s own military generals), that really began questioning Rumsfeld’s Iraq tactics - we just might have recklessly lost the war against terrorism in Iraq, just like the previous occupiers before us - the Russians in Afghanistan. Unfortunately many of these same generals retired in protest or were relieved of their command for their criticism of Rumsfeld or the Iraq war- But, not before they got the media and public attention to bring about “the change in course” of the Iraq war tactics and the early retirement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who was replaced with William Gates.

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Eric Shinseki| Paul Eaton | John Riggs | Ricardo Sanchez | Charles Swannack | John Bastiste

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Wesley Clark | Merrill”Tony” McPeak | Brent Scowcroft | Gregory Newbold | Anthony Zinni

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Bernard Trainor | Henry “Hugh” Shelton | Robert Gard |