In 2008, Americans were (or, rather, ought to have been) shocked to learn that some $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction went missing due to “inefficiencies and bad management,” according am inspector general’s report. At the time, it was simply understood that the U.S.-led administration that ran Iraq until June 2004 was unable to account for the funds.
Asleep at the wheel
“Severe inefficiencies and poor management by the Coalition Provisional Authority has left auditors with no guarantee the money was properly used,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., director of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Some years later. reports are swirling that nearly $ 7 billion of Iraq’s oil money, siphoned into the country to rebuild critical infrastructure, may have simply been lifted by some enterprising crooks.
“It may have been stolen. It was vulnerable to fraud and waste and abuse,” the Financial Times quoted Stuart Bowen, who remains the US special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, as saying.
If the money was stolen, one of the most significant financial crimes in history would have happened under the watch of the very office initially established by Congress to oversee the $61 billion of US money spent rebuilding the country.
Coming on the heels of the “gross incompetence” excuse deployed by Bowen to excuse the disappearance of the billions earlier in the war, should it come as a surprise that Mr. Bowen has managed to keep his job?
It seems Bowen and his pals at the Pentagon have since been trying to find out what happened to this same lump sum since 2005 when it was previously suggested that its disappearance was a matter of sloppy accounting.
Now the question remains…what’s worse: “sloppy accounting” to the tune of several billion dollars or allowing one of the largest heists in American history to occur under the watchful eye of the world’s most powerful military?
