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05.02 11 Baltimore City Students Win Awards in Md. History Day Competition Ref.: Civic Events Ref.: Arts & Education Events Ref.: Public Service Notices Travel
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05.15 Horrific Injuries Linked to BP Dispersant Corexit 05.15 'Last Call at the Oasis': Why Time Is Running Out to Save Our Drinking Water 05.14 German Government to Oppose Fracking 05.11 Petition calls on Brazilian president to veto 'catastrophic' forest code 05.11 Bans on School Junk Food Pay Off in California 05.11 When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed 05.10 Game Over for the Climate 05.10 Pollution: the great leveller 05.10 New study: Amish prove raw milk promotes health in children 05.10 Big Agriculture's Big Secrets: 9 Things You Need to Know About the Food You Eat 05.09 Gloria Feldt: The War on Women [video] 05.02 Common Pesticide “Disturbs” the Brains of Children 05.02 Humans Still Evolving as Our Brains Shrink 05.01 Big Changes in Ocean Salinity Intensifying Water Cycle Ref. High health-care costs: It’s all in the pricing - graphic Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here) Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries “News” Media
05.01 News Corporation has sought to undermine elected governments Daily The Daily Howler Justice Matters
05.16 Is the filibuster unconstitutional? 05.15 MONEY UNLIMITED 05.11 How the Corporate Right Hijacked America's Courts to Enrich the Top 1 Percent 05.03 Supreme Court Favorability Reaches New Low 05.01 Eliot Spitzer’s challenge to DOJ as it investigates Wall Street: ‘Bring some cases’ - video 05.01 Laissez-faire with strip-searches: America's two-faced liberalism US Politics, Policy & Culture
05.16 5 Ways Conservatives are Destroying the Institution of Marriage 05.16 Congress: The TSA Is Wasting Hundreds Of Millions In Taxpayer Dollars 05.16 The Economic Case for Same-Sex Marriage 05.16 If Information Is Power, What Is Lack Of Information? [video] 05.15 IMAGE: It doesn't have to be true, just credible... 05.15 WEDDING BELLS 05.15 Memo to Mitt: Time to Fess Up on Bullying 05.14 “The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” 05.14 Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane 05.11 Why Atheists Have Become a Kick-Ass Movement You Want on Your Side 05.11 Fixable Error, New Insight, and Social Security 05.10 Ballot Access 05.10 Christian Conservatives vs. Sex: The Long War Over Reproductive Freedom 05.03 Out of the Margins, Into the Fray 05.03 Occupy May Day: Voices from the LA protests [video] 05.02 Jon Stewart Assails GOP for Their Hypocrisy on Obama Campaign Bringing Up Bin Laden [video] 05.02 Hamptons Home Prices Rise as Buyers Prefer Luxury Deals 05.02 The Administration Is Scared of Its Own Regulatory Shadow High Crimes?
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05.16 “What Scares Me Isn’t $2 Billion Loss JP Morgan Made, What Scares Me is the Record $19 Billion in Profits” [video] 05.16 Republican Party suckles at the breast of Big Business 05.16 Weisbrot and Krugman are Wrong: Greece cannot pull off an Argentina 05.15 Greek deadlock heightens fears of full European economic crisis 05.14 Why We Regulate 05.11 Indentured Servitude for Seniors: Social Security Garnished for Student Debts 05.11 Breaking Up Four Big Banks 05.11 Wall Street’s immunity 05.11 How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform 05.10 Real Estate 4 Ransom -- locking up the Great American Dream 05.10 Quelle Surprise! Fed Defends Incompetent Bank Management Against Investors 05.10 Europe’s Problems Multiply 05.09 Ryan Shrugs: Overlooked GOP Budget Provision Would Fuel Offshoring With New Tax Incentives 05.09 Top 1% Fills Gov. Scott Walker’s Recall War Chest With $25 Million 05.09 ALEC Affiliated Corporations 05.09 Teachers’ Board Becomes Fifteenth Group To Drop ALEC 05.09 ALEC’s Top Five Anti-Environment ‘Model’ Laws 05.09 Special Rights for ALEC: Three States Exempt Stealth Corporate Lobbying Group From Lobbying Rules 05.09 A web of privilege supports this so-called meritocracy 05.03 How Wall Street Drives Up Gas Prices -- Ripping Us Off and Killing Jobs 05.03 Paul Krugman on How to Fix the Economy - and Why It's Easier Than You Think 05.02 There is an alternative to austerity 05.01 Under Catholic pressure Paul Ryan backs away from Rand, Objectivism 05.01 Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! 05.01 Tea Party Congressmen Accept Cash From Bailed-Out Bankers 05.01 Paul Krugman and Ron Paul discuss economics – as it happened 05.01 No alternative to austerity International
05.15 IDF closes Palestinian school to make way for West Bank training zone 05.14 Noam Chomsky on: 05.14 INFOGRAPHIC: Gas Spending Around The World 05.14 Graphic: Products of Slavery 05.14 Israel warned of volatile situation as Palestinian hunger strikers near death 05.14 How Right-Wing Extremists and Islamists Are the Same 05.14 Guatemala's land grab and massacre 05.11 U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam 05.11 Thousands of British police join anti-austerity protest 05.10 China Investment Corp. Stops Buying Europe Government Debt on Crisis Concern 05.09 Inside Syria's crackdown: 'I found my boys burning in the street' 05.03 “We Did Not Choose This War” and Other Hypocrisies 05.03 Jobless Rate Reaches New High in Euro Zone 05.02 Collapsing Afghanistan & Pakistan Refuse to Cooperate with Obama Photo Op 05.02 Free the torture report 05.01 What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? 05.01 Quebec students ignite the popular imagination 05.01 Occupy Wall Street Plans Global Protests in Resurgence 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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