Troops Stole Boxes of Iraq Reconstruction Cash ... Literally ...

[ensho]

Troops Stole Boxes of Iraq Reconstruction Cash ... Literally ... But There's a Lot More to the Story


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/136387/troops_stole_boxes_of_iraq_reconstruction_cash_..._literally_..._but_there%27s_a_lot_more_to_the_story/



A wave of prosecutions and some 25 "theft probes" are underway, but it's the inevitable result of a Pentagon policy that has bred rampant corruption.


-snip-

The story has gotten relatively little attention, and no doubt the response to these crimes will take the predictable form of blaming it on a few bad apples. But, as the Times hints, the system that has produced this sort of corruption by U.S soldiers was ripe for abuse from the start. "The prosecutions reveal the extent to which troops have been tempted by the Pentagon's 'money as a weapon system' policy, which has left battlefields awash in cash."


Late last summer, the Washington Post ran a article titled "Money as a Weapon," which painted a picture of how, five years into the U.S. occupation, "American cash" had become the U.S. military's most valuable strategic counterinsurgency tool.

-snip-

Jamail described how the sheik receives "regular installments of money" in the form of "shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills" from the U.S. military.

-snip-

Robert J. Stein Jr., a Coalition Provisional Authority official put it a different way. "This was more cash than Donald Trump had ever seen in his life," he said, according to the Times. Stein was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2006 for playing a part in a bribery, theft and money laundering case. "When you work around money like that," he told investigators, "it becomes, 'So what, it's just paper.'"
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aaarrrrgggghhhhh

[aquart]

1. Wait? Wasn't that the idea?

What are we complaining about?

[Mist]

2. I guess they need some plausible suspects to account for the missing trillions. I've always assumed

that those missing pallets of cash were diverted to black ops.

[arcadian]

3. Wait til they stop paying the insurgents off. All hell will break loose.