[angaq0k]

From Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials who ran Iraq until last month used a system open to fraud and error to track about $20 billion in Iraqi funds spent during the occupation, accounting firm KPMG said in a report made public on Friday.

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority's underlying record-keeping "greatly diminishes the transparency of the expenditures made," the interim study said.

It also left the Development Fund for Iraq, a United Nations-established means of shepherding Iraqi oil revenues during the U.S. occupation, "open to fraudulent acts," the report said.

One reason for delays in handing over information, the Defense Department said in reply, was confidential contractor financial information, including pricing data, the government is barred from releasing without permission of the companies involved.

"And to date, the companies have declined to permit release," said Marine Lt. Col. Rose-Ann Lynch, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Halliburton did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The U.N. Security Council set up the monitoring board in May 2003 to make sure Iraq's funds were spent properly.

Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 that ousted President Saddam Hussein, $10.8 billion in Iraqi oil money has been deposited in the development fund, more than half of the total deposits of $20.2 billion for the period.

The rest was left over from the defunct U.N. Oil-for-Food program meant to provide for Iraqis' basic needs while U.N. sanctions were in effect. Other sources include repatriated funds and foreign donations.

And from The Moscow Times

Like their Baathist predecessors, the Bushist overlords were given control of the UN-established Development Fund, which was supposed to guarantee that Iraq's oil revenues were spent on the needs of the Iraqi people. But like Saddam Hussein, Bush instead used the fund as a barrel of personal pork to reward cronies and buy local political support with bribes. By the time Bush viceroy Paul Bremer made his hugger-mugger handover of "sovereignty" to CIA man Allawi, there was less than $1 billion left in the $20 billion fund -- with more than $6 billion of this siphoned off in just the last two months of direct U.S. rule, The Guardian reports.

Where did it all go? Half went to "Iraqi ministries" staffed with local frontmen like Allawi and his cousin, convicted fraudster and intelligence forger Ahmad Chalabi, and with Bush partisans from back home, many of them young right-wing zealots with no administrative experience whatsoever. Another chunk went to military units for use in rebuilding buildings they'd blasted down, paying compensation to the families of innocent people they'd killed, and buying intelligence and informants to help meet Bushist quotas for filling the torturous interrogation rooms in Abu Ghraib and its gulag satellites -- where the Red Cross says up to 90 percent of all the captives were innocent. Money well spent, obviously.

The rest of the fund was given to Halliburton and friends for "reconstruction" -- usually in noncompetitive contracts doled out by Bremer and his handpicked "Iraqi Governing Council" without any independent review, the GAO reports. Almost all of the $20 billion fund was oil revenue -- a nationalized resource belonging solely to the Iraqi people. And except for some chump change left behind for the CIA terrorist, it's all gone now.

But the scam gets even sweeter. During the 14 months of direct rule, Bush -- an old oilman -- somehow failed to have the Iraqi oil under his charge properly metered. That means there was simply no way on Earth to keep legitimate accounts on the oil revenue that was supposed to go into the Development Fund. Trying to make some sense of these well-cooked books, Christian Aid and international auditors compared the best production and pricing figures available from oil industry experts -- and found a discrepancy of between $1.8 billion and $3 billion from the Bushists' claims of total oil revenues given to the fund.

We told you it was sweet: You get control of Iraq's oil money and dish it out to your cronies and collaborators until it's all gone -- while setting aside a few secret billions for yourself that no one can ever trace. It's the same operation that Hussein ran. He's accused of skimming $4.4 billion from the Development Fund while he was in power -- but that took him years. Bush almost matched him in just 14 months. As the Iraqis say of the occupation: "The pupil has gone; the master has arrived."

Indeed. Halliburton, under Cheney, once did a paltry $23 million in backdoor business with Hussein; now, cutting out the middleman (and more than 10,000 innocent lives, as well), the company has $18 billion in Iraqi war contracts, thanks to its White House rainmakers. And no doubt that $3 billion unmetered skim will be bankrolling some fancy Houston mansions and choice Texas scrub brush in the years to come.

The question of war -- its causes and consequences -- is always a multi-headed hydra, defeating easy analysis. But for the thieves of Baghdad, one simple fact holds true: Crime pays.

A very bleak picture of the situation... Comments?

[Spheric Harlot]

Hang them.