Pentagon can’t account for $8.57 billion in Iraqi funds

Jerry Mazza
Online Journal
Aug 7, 2010

B is for billions. And b is for it’s hard to believe that they’ve done it again. The last time, even more money vanished, which I noted in my article, Following Pentagon trillions to Israel and 9-11. This was under the Zionist Dov Zakheim’s watch as Comptroller of the Pentagon from May 4, 2001, to March 10, 2004.

I wrote in that article, “At that time he was unable to explain the disappearance of $1 trillion dollars. Actually, nearly three years earlier, Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001, that an audit discovered $2.3 trillion was also missing from the Pentagon books. That story, as I mentioned, was buried under 9-11’s rubble. The two sums disappeared on Zakheim’s watch.

“Yet on May 6, 2004, Zakheim took a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most prestigious strategy consulting firms in the world. One of its clients then was Blessed Relief, a charity said to be a front for Osama bin Laden. Booz, Allen & Hamilton then also worked closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the research arm of the Department of Defense. So the dark card was shifted to another part of the deck.”

In a more recent article, I noted that Dov Zakheim retires from Booz Allen & Hamilton. Post BAH, Dov Zakheim has now surfaced in a blog called Shadow Government for Foreign Policy magazine. Still at it, this time he posted an article dismissing the 91,000 documents released by whistleblower Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, as basically “good grist for historians’ footnotes, and nothing more.”!

Of course, those of us who appreciated WikiLeaks exposing Pakistan ISI and government ties, noting the abuses of US Kill Teams, fudging numbers of civilian and troop deaths, discovering a Pakistan Taliban connection, were appreciative. Every little bit of truth helps. Drop by drop you fill the pot, as the saying goes. BTW, you can read Dov’s entire dismissive epistle linked above.

Returning to the latest Pentagon story, Audit: US cannot account for $8.7B in Iraqi funds, AP reported from Baghdad, “The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation, according to an audit released Tuesday.”

The report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds were being spent in a country where people complain basic services like electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. audit found that shoddy record keeping by the Defense Department left the Pentagon unable to fully account for $8.7 billion it withdrew between 2004 and 2007 from a special fund set up by the U.N. Security Council. Of that amount, the Pentagon “could not provide documentation to substantiate how it spent [the] remaining $2.6 billion.” Now that Dov and Rummy are gone, obviously a new legion of miscreants has taken over.

Sabah al-Saedi, chairman of the Parliamentary Integrity Committee, said that “Iraq should take legal action to get back huge amount of money,” and that the money, “should be spent for rebuilding the country and providing services for this poor nation.” A report by the Special inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction also accused the DOD of lax oversight and week controls, stopping short at fraud, though I don’t know why they’d stop. Fraud seems to be the operative word here as back in 2001-2004.

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