Billions over Baghdad
by Duncan on September 14, 2007
Illustration by John Blackford. By Peter van Agtmael/Polaris (desert), Konstantin Inozemtsev/Alamy (money).
“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. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam’s palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.”
“The New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.”
This article blew my mind.
[Full Article by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steel | Q&A with the authors]
2 comments
Hey Duncan. Been a reader of your blog for some time now and I just wanted to express a little opinion here. In no way is the whole Iraq thing a good use of United States money, resources, or lives. But I don’t see how people can throw stones at my government as if they were citizens that paid that money in taxes to begin with. If I lived in the U.K. I would be throwing stones at my government in the U.K. for following the U.S. to Iraq, not spreading U.S. hate by belittling a country I am not a part of.
Again. This is all just my opinion. I will continue to read your site and I love your photos and even your opinion. It is nice to have people in this world who see things differently then I do.
Thank you.
by Orrin on September 14, 2007 at 12:40 pm #
That’s a totally fair point. Although I don’t consider posting stuff like this to be “spreading U.S. hate”. I posted this article because it was incredibly fascinating, not because it makes the Department of Defense or the Bush administration look incompetent.
Keep in mind some might consider me a left leaning atheist environmentalist hippie type and I live in Canada. Whereas it appears as though you may or may not be a somewhat religious young man in Georgia whose done work as “an IT Specialist for the United States Department of Defense Army Non-Appropriated Fund”.
So we obviously have very different perspectives and life experience.
On the issue of Iraq there aren’t many stones to throw at the Canadian government because we did not join the so called coalition of the willing. In retrospect that was one of the best decisions made by the government in recent years.
And yes it is nice to hear from people who see things differently. Thanks for stopping by!
by Duncan on September 14, 2007 at 2:27 pm #