This article connects hawkish neocons with outrageous theft of enormous amounts of money. They sponsor a war, people die, and they cart away pallet loads of money. This has happened time and time again, but few talk about it. But it’s a real thing, and it’s a real problem. Here we talk about it.
Executive summary
When there is a war, there is a great deal of confusion. The nation involved in the strife loses control of their assets, and the attacking forces live in a period of confusion. Funds, often enormous, are poured into the region, to help “stabilize” it. However, the fact remains that the funds, the moneys and all the banks in the disputed combat areas are all “up for grabs”. Thus offering an enormous bonanza for the people who are involved in the subjugation of a given region.
It becomes a wonderful mechanism for military leaders, and politicians, to become enormously wealthy within a short period of time.
War is a way for politicians to become insanely wealthy in a short period of time.
And as such, the United States has turned this into a racket.
The basis for this article
This article was inspired by another article titled; The case of the missing $6.6 billion. In which the author Bill Ardolino asked on June 13th, 2011 what happened to the billions of dollars in “humanitarian aid”, and “infrastructure investments” that the United States gave to Iraq to rebuild their nation.
He argued that Iraq still looks like a pile of mud huts with pot-hole filled dirt roads and a nation devoid of any kind of serious infrastructure rivaling that of before the Iraq conflict. He is right.
Iraq is a big mess with no obvious reconstructive efforts by any measurable degree. What happened? Where did the money go, and why are Americans still expected to pick up the tab?
Billions of dollars. Billions.
Q Chimes in
The Corrupt System Has Been Ripping Off the US Taxpayer Q!!mG7VJxZNCI 24 Nov 2019 - 4:24:25 AM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNqKhRcpktU📁 [16:00] "Are we going to be sending massive amounts of money that simply goes into other people's [personal] bank account(s) [theft]." - POTUS Who audits where foreign aid actually goes? Nobody. Foreign aid > Country [X] > Personal Bank Accts [+US person(s) involved]. Think Iran. Think Paris Accord [attempt]. Think All. Corrupt system. Do you think [GS] is spending his own money re: push of radical viewpoint adoption? US TAXPAYER payments [aid] > directly/indirectly [GS] organizations? Re-read drops re: 'Foreign Aid' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2qIXXafxCQ&feature=youtu.be📁 [Listen carefully] RETURNING POWER TO THE PEOPLE. DRAINING THE SWAMP. POTUS IS FIGHTING FOR YOU. It's been a long time since we've had a non_corrupt POTUS who cares for the people, and not himself. Q
That’s “billion,” with a “B”:
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born. Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time. This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.
And it’s not only the “humanitarian funds” send by well-wishing Americans and generous Congressmen, but rather the entire gold bullion of the nation in strife…
The post-invasion chaos in Iraq was severe enough that massive sums of money regularly went missing, the majority (is) thought to have found its way into the pockets of those Iraqis who were early to adopt dialogue with Coalition forces.
Some of it undoubtedly funded the insurgency.
In 2008, an Iraqi politician told the LWJ his positive assessment that the “major” corruption, the deals worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” were over.
But he anticipated that the “middle to lower-level corruption will continue for a long time and will be a huge problem.” This was progress of a depressing sort, I thought at the time.
The lack of effective accounting controls in place to manage Iraqi use of funds, both oil receipts and international aid, was shocking then, and continued to surprise, despite noticeable improvements at the ministry and ground levels.
A relevant amount of corruption along the lines of baksheesh and “ghost soldiers” is culturally inevitable in Iraq, but the fact that individuals and organizations could steal that quantity of money is a big deal, and potentially very harmful to US security interests.
It almost goes without saying that billions can buy lots of people, Kalashnikovs and IED components.
In fact, the best case scenario is that a number of Americans, Iraqi political figures, and Iraqi businessmen are merely living incredibly large off ill-gotten gains and pumping most of the money into the economies of Jordan and Dubai.
Fingers crossed.
Moon over Alabama adds his two cents…
The Washington Post liberated some 2,000 pages of more than 400 interview transcripts and summaries from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The interviews were with officials and soldiers involved in the war on Afghanistan. Reading through the three part series on the papers is depressing. The opinions and narrations of the insiders are, as could be expected, devastating: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Since 2001 the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on Afghanistan. Most of the money has flown back to 'contractors' in the United States. A significant part, whatever bribes and corruption would generate, was invested by Afghan officials in real estate in Dubai. In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity. Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had “self-organized into a kleptocracy” by 2006 — and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy. Little of the money reached the common people of Afghanistan. Where it did it was wasted on projects that Afghanistan will never be able to sustain. The corruption is one reason why many Afghans tolerate or even favor Taliban rule. - Some Truth About The War On Afghanistan
The United States government responds.
Well, having the claim that neocons and the government are after gold and riches does not fit the narrative that those in power want to project. They want to keep on continuing with their plunder unabated. So they utilize “fact checking” organizations to validate their narrative (and they pay them handsomely, don’t you know.)
Here’s a link to their version of the story. Note that it does not address the lack of infrastructure growth, new public works, or anything that they infrastructure investment is supposed to create. All they do is say… “Nah. It’s false, don’t you know.”
And here is an expose on the story behind one such “fact checking organization”. Know who you are dealing with and what is going on, why don’t you.
The history of plundering gold…
All attribution to JMBullion.com with this graphic.
A certain degree of error is expected and excusable in the circumstances of post-invasion Iraq.
But $6.6 billion-worth is not.
Links
- How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish
- US sent plane with $400 million in cash to Iran – CNNPolitics
- U.S. sent pallets of cash to Baghdad – Reuters
- TIL the US delivered $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills to Iraq, then “misplaced” it all
- Obama’s $1.7 Billion Tribute to Iran Paid in Cash
- White House Caught Secretly Airlifting $1.7 Billion US
- Trump: Iran Released Video of Money Being Taken Off Plane
- U.S. has lost sight of cash from $70 billion sent to …
- U.S. sent pallets of cash to Baghdad – Reuters
- NY Fed’s $40 Billion Iraqi Money Trail
- Afghan Hawalas Transfer Billions Out of Country – WSJ
- As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder …
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