God Dem!

It weighed 28 tons and took up as much room as 74 washing machines. It was $2.4 billion in $100 bills, and Baghdad needed it ASAP.

The initial request from U.S. officials in charge of Iraq required the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to decide whether it could open its vault on a Sunday, a day banks aren’t usually open.

"Just when you think you’ve seen it all," read one e-mail from an exasperated Fed official.

"Pocket change," said another e-mail.

Then, when the shipment date changed, officials had to scramble to
line up U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes to hold the money. They did, and the $2,401,600,000 was delivered to Baghdad on June 22, 2004.

It was the largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.

The cash -- a total of 363 tons, generated mostly from oil revenues -- was Iraqi funds that had been held in trust by the Federal Reserve under the terms of a United Nations resolution.

Disclosure of the frantic transfer in the final days of U.S.
control over Iraq came during a daylong hearing Tuesday that indicated growing worry from Congress over U.S. oversight of spending in Iraq.

Both Republicans and Democrats appeared taken aback by the volume of cash sent to Iraq: nearly $12 billion over the course of the U.S. occupation from March 2003 to June 2004, said a report by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who had reviewed e-mails and documents subpoenaed from the bank.

Previous reports by the inspector-general have faulted the
CPA for failing to implement adequate controls over 8.8 billion dollars in DFI money. The hearing before the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Government Reform was the first to focus on the DFI. Pressure to convene it has been led by the panel's Democrats, led by California's Henry Waxman, but the magnitude of the apparently mismanaged funds appeared to produce bipartisan shock.

The largest single recipient of Iraqi funds was Halliburton, the oil services firm once led by U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, which received 1.6 billion dollars in Iraqi oil proceeds under a contract to import fuel and repair oil fields.

According to DCAA auditors, Halliburton's overcharges under this
contract are more than 218 million dollars. A security firm, Custer Battles, received over 11 million dollars in Iraqi funds, including over 4 million in cash. The company has been barred from receiving federal contracts and faces a False Claims Act lawsuit for multiple fraudulent billings. Over 600 million dollars in cash was shipped from Baghdad to four regions in Iraq to allow commanders flexibility to fund local reconstruction projects. An audit of one of the four regions found more than 80 percent of the funds could not be properly accounted for and that over 7 million dollars in cash was missing. CPA officials gave over 8 billion dollars in cash to Iraqi ministries. The Special Inspector
General found significant funds paid to ”ghost employees” and billion-dollar discrepancies in some expenditures.

Waxman said the largest single recipient of DFI funds was Halliburton. ”The company vastly overcharged to import gasoline into Iraq and to provide other oil-related services. These overcharges -- which exceed 200 million dollars -- were billed to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But U.S. officials arranged for over 80 percent of them to be paid out of the DFI.” The DFI, which was run by the United States, is the successor to the Oil-for-Food Programme, which was run by the United Nations. More than 8 billion dollars in the Oil-for-Food Programme was transferred into the DFI by the U.N. Security Council. In a separate development, Democratic legislators stepped up criticism of Halliburton for what they said was ”war profiteering,” citing Pentagon audits that question more than 1 billion dollars of the company's bills for work in Iraq. At a Democrat-sponsored forum on Tuesday, Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said that estimates of excessive spending and improper billing by Halliburton are more than twice as high as those in previous official reports.

One major recipient of DFI money, Halliburton Corp., was a point of contention between subcommittee members and Pentagon officials
yesterday.

Subcommittee members objected to the fact that Pentagon officials
had heavily redacted internal Defense Department audits before providing them to a U.N. board charged with monitoring the DFI program. The audits found more than $200 million in questioned charges that Halliburton had passed to the government, primarily on a no-bid contract for importing fuel.

Pentagon officials said they relied on the company's suggestions for deciding what parts of the audits to redact because they didn't want Halliburton's proprietary information made public. House members from both parties objected to that reasoning.

"Overcharges to the government are not trade secrets," said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.).

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on national security, emerging threats and international relations, said the redactions "regretfully, very regretfully, make it appear DOD has something to hide. This undermines our international standing and, even more importantly, harms our efforts in Iraq."

Shays said he has repeatedly "begged" the Pentagon to provide Congress with the documents underlying its decision to black out parts of the audits. Yesterday, he threatened to seek a subpoena if the documents aren't provided by Monday.

It was approximately three years ago the GAO (General Accounting Office) attempted to do what congress requested: an audit of the DoD/Pentagon. After a solid year, the GAO had to report back to congress that they could not complete the audit as there was no supporting documentation to account for what had happened to a little over $1.4 Trillion, yes Trillion with a capital “T” that was MISSING!

Now today we learn that even more money is missing. The GAO
(Government Accounting Office) has reported that the DoD has lost another $3.5 billion of taxpayer money—money and equipment have just disappeared and no one knows where.

The amount of money Rumsfeld’s Department of War “loses” every few months would be more than enough to properly fund the V.A--instead veterans of this nation’s wars are being denied access on a daily basis; others wait for months to get appointments for even basic medical services; specialized care is even worse—all due primarily to under funding.