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Local News & Opinion
05.07 YouthWorks Campaign Needs Support for Summer Jobs Books, Art & Entertainment
05.14 George W. Bush’s Other Undeclared War: NCLB 05.13 New Buchanan Book: Anglo-American Ascendancy Lost in Unnecessary Wars 04.30 A Litany of Horrors 04.17 Peter Hallward's "Damming the Flood" (Part II) Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Health & Environment
05.12 The World above 350 ppm CO2 04.28 Green Scare State Terrorism 04.21 Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World 04.16 WORLD FACING HUGE NEW CHALLENGE ON FOOD FRONT Ref. : Single-Payer FAQ Ref. : Environmental Health News Ref. : Sundance Channel's THE GREEN Ref. : What is Global Warming, and what can citizens do about it? Ref. : Global Warming Links Ref. : Health & Nutrition Links Media Watching
05.06 US Media Trivializes Campaign 2008 05.06 Death's Factotum: Michael Gordon and the Times Pour Pentagon Poison into Nation's Ear 05.05 TV News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits 05.05 Color-Coded: Jeremiah Wright and the Real Deal on Race 05.02 The Right's America-Hating Preacher 04.23 Pentagon Pundits 04.22 US News Media's Latest Disgrace 04.18 ABC's Debate Debacle 04.16 Reprising the Genocidal Fury of Thomas Friedman US Politics, Policy & Culture
05.14 Bush Operative Pushes Voter-ID Law 05.13 Hillary Clinton, John McCain and the "Stupid" Vote 05.13 McCain and the 'Unitary Executive' 05.09 The Democratic Presidential Race: A View from Pennsylvania 05.08 Serving the System: Corporate Control of U.S. Would Continue Under Obama 05.06 A Republican for Barack 05.05 Thinking About Voter Registrations 05.05 'Beware the Terrible Simplifiers' 05.01 U.S. Military Coordinated Day Of Prayer Events With Christian Right Group 04.30 John McCain Won’t Be Looking for the Union Label 04.30 Put Him Out With the Pastor! 04.25 Clinton Courted Racists in the Pennsylvania Primary 04.24 Groundbreaking Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud; Warns Elections Vulnerable to Theft 04.24 Triviamongering in the U.S. presidential race 04.24 Campaign 1988 Lives! 04.23 Hillary Clinton's Monstrous Threat 04.21 Brilliant Disguise: Bush Torture, Obama and The Boss 04.19 The Clintons, Triangulating with China 04.18 American Hegemony Is Not Guaranteed 04.18 Are the Clintons Playing Joe McCarthy? 04.17 The Weather Underground 'Theme' US High Crimes & Incompetence
05.14 Falling Cedars: Fomenting War in Lebanon -- and Beyond 05.12 Armed Truce: Surging Into Slaughter on Sadr City's Jerusalem Street 05.10 Lost E-Mails Obscure 'Plame-gate' 05.09 Fallujah Revisited: Bush, Petraeus Prepare 'Cleansing' of Sadr City 05.09 Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe 05.07 Willing Executioners: America's Bipartisan Atrocity Deepens in Somalia 05.05 The Terror Master: Bush Orders Covert 'Surge' Against Iran, with Dem Support 05.01 American and Israeli War Crimes: Same Atrocities, Different Responses 04.30 Halliburton Bribe Case Haunts Cheney 04.29 Getting Over Scalia 04.29 The Iraq War Morphs Into The Iranian War 04.28 The Torture Election 04.28 The Clock is Ticking for A US Attack on Iran 04.28 The Bush Team's Geneva Hypocrisy 04.25 New Terror War Atrocity: Beheading the Innocent for Bush in Somalia 04.23 Glorious Fruits of the War for Civilization 04.22 VA Tried to Conceal Extent of Attempted Veteran Suicides, Email Shows 04.21 What About the War, Benedict? 04.18 Updating Sami Al-Arian - His Ordeal Continues 04.16 Would Obama Hold Bush Accountable? Economics & Business
05.12 Thinking About Strategies 05.08 Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower 04.28 Thinking About Subtleties 04.23 The Oil Vice 04.22 The US Economy and the Costs of War 04.21 Thinking About Shakiness International
05.12 Disturbing Stirrings - Ratcheting Up For War on Iran 05.05 Sixty Years of Palestinian Displacement, Occupation and Suffering 05.02 Feeding Moloch: Last Barriers to War on Iran Come Down 05.01 The Iranian Chessboard 05.01 Blood Diamonds, Blood Oil and Blood Food 05.01 Denying Palestinians Free Movement in the West Bank 04.30 The Ignored Lessons on the Stupidity of War 04.24 Breaking the Silence - Israeli Soldiers Speak 04.23 What the Iraq War is about We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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COMMENTARY:The Case of the Missing $21 BillionWho's Following the Iraq Money?...more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports
During the days of the Nixon Watergate scandal investigation, reporter Bob Woodword was famously advised by his mysterious
source, Deep Throat, to "follow the money" as a way of cracking the story.
Well, there is a lot of money to follow in the current scandal that can be best described as the Bush/Cheney administration, and so far, nobody's doing it. My bet for the place that needs the most following is the more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports, and for which there has been little or no accounting. When the Coalition Provisional Authority was terminated in late 2004, with corruption still rampant and growing, Congress redefined Bowen's position as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Bowen, went to work. He uncovered some corruption in a report in early 2006 that sounded scathing enough. Bowen found cases of double billing by contractors, of payments for work that was never done, and other scandals. But he never came up with more than $1 billion or so worth of problems--a small fraction of the total amount of money that was vanishing. Now we know why so little was done. It turns out that Bowen was never really looking very hard. One of the laws the president chose to ignore with a 'signing statement' was the one establishing the inspector general post
for Iraq, saying that the new inspector
general would have no authority to investigate any contracts or corruption issues involving the Pentagon.
When the Boston Globe, this past April, broke the story that President Bush has been quietly setting aside over
750 acts passed by Congress, claiming he has the authority as "unitary executive" and as commander in chief to ignore such
laws, it turned out that one of the laws the president chose to ignore was the one establishing the inspector general post
for Iraq. What the president did was write a so-called signing statement on the side (unpublicized of course--though it was quietly posted on the White House website), saying that the new inspector
general would have no authority to investigate any contracts or corruption issues involving the Pentagon.
As the signing statement puts it: Title III of the Act creates an Inspector General (IG) of the CPA. Title III shall be construed in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authorities to conduct the Nation's foreign affairs, to supervise the unitary executive branch, and as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.Well, since most of the missing money has been going to or through the military in Iraq, and since the president can define just about anything having to do with Iraq as "national security," that pretty much meant nothing of consequence would be discovered by the inspector general in Iraq. Bowen simply never mentioned to anyone that he was not doing the job that Congress had intended.
You might think that the inspector general himself would have complained about such a restriction on his authority to
do the job that Congress had intended, but this is a man who has a long history of working as a loyal manservant to the president.
Bowen was a deputy general counsel for Governor Bush (meaning he was an assistant to the ever solicitous solicitor Alberto
Gonzales). He did yeoman service to Bush as a member of the team that handled the famous vote count atrocity in Florida in
the November 2000 election, making sure every vote wasn't counted, and then worked under Gonzales again in the White
House during Bush's first term, before returning briefly to private practice.
Bowen simply never mentioned to anyone that, courtesy of an unconstitutional order from the president, he was not doing the job that Congress had intended. ...when the inspector general of the Pentagon was asked why the Pentagon had
no audit team in Iraq to look for fraud he cleverly replied that such a team was "not needed" because Congress had
set up the special inspector general unit (Bowen) to do that.
The deception was far-reaching. When Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, was asked in 2005 during
a congressional hearing by Christopher Shays (R-CT), chair of the House government reform subcommittee, why the Pentagon had
no audit team in Iraq to look for fraud, the facile Gimble replied that such a team was "not needed" because Congress had
set up the special inspector general unit to do that. He conveniently didn't mention that the president had barred the special
inspector general from investigating Pentagon scandals.
This would all be pretty funny except for two things. First of all, Americans and Iraqis are dying in droves because of the chaos that the U.S. invasion and occupation have created in Iraq--a problem that that $9 billion in missing Congressionally allocated funds, and the bales of US dollars, were supposed to have solved. Second, and I admit this is pretty speculative on my part, money being like water, it tends to flow to the lowest level, which, from a moral and ethical standpoint, would be the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican Party machine that put them, and the do-nothing Congress that covers up for them, into office. My guess is that a fair piece of those many billions of dollars is sloshing around back in the U.S. paying for things like Republican Party electoral dirty tricks, vote theft, bribing of Democratic members of Congress, and god knows what else. If this seems far-fetched to anyone, remember that this administration has included a number of people who were linked to the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, when the creative--and criminal--idea was conceived of secretly selling Pentagon stocks of shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, and using the proceeds to secretly fund the U.S.-trained and organized Contra fighters who were fighting to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (Congress had inconveniently banned any U.S. aid to the Contras). It seems to me inconceivable that this corrupt and obsessively power-mad administration would have passed up an opportunity to get its hands on some of the easy money flowing into Iraq over the course of the last three years. Given all this, it seems almost unfathomable that Democratic Party leaders would be insisting that there would be no impeachment hearings
in Congress if Democrats were to succeed in winning back Congress this November.
Given all this, it seems almost unfathomable that Democratic Party leaders would be insisting, as have Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, that there would be no impeachment hearings
in Congress if Democrats were to succeed in winning back Congress this November.
What better way to follow that money than an old-fashioned impeachment hearing into why the president unconstitutionally subverted the intent of Congress in establishing an office of special inspector general for corruption in Iraq? Republished in the Chronicle with permission of the author. Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled This Can't be Happening! is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is The Case for Impeachment, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. Copyright © 2006 The Baltimore Chronicle.
All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on June 8, 2006. |
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