{"id":3128,"date":"2004-12-02T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2004-12-02T17:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3128.html"},"modified":"2004-12-02T12:00:07","modified_gmt":"2004-12-02T17:00:07","slug":"about-that-oil-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/about-that-oil-money\/","title":{"rendered":"About that oil money…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before the war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq’s oil money would be key to a post-Saddam future. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, on March 27, 2003, said<\/a>, “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” Donald Rumsfeld told<\/a> Fortune Magazine in the fall of 2002 that we needn’t be worried about the excessive costs of the war in Iraq: “If you [worry about just] the cost, the money, Iraq is a very different situation from Afghanistan\u2026Iraq has oil.”<\/p>\n

That was, of course, before Iraq’s oil money started disappearing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States took control of all of the Iraqi government’s bank accounts, including the income from oil sales. The United Nations approved the financial takeover, and President Bush vowed to spend Iraq’s money wisely. But now critics are raising serious questions about how well the United States handled billions of dollars in Iraqi oil funds. <\/p>\n

Iraq’s oil resources generate billions of dollars — money the United States promised to protect after overthrowing Saddam Hussein.<\/p>\n

Now, Frank Willis, a former senior American official in Iraq, tells NBC News the United States failed to safeguard the oil money known as the Development Fund for Iraq.<\/p>\n

“There was, in my mind, pervasive leakage in assets of Iraq, and to some extent, those assets were squandered,” says Willis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oil revenue was supposed to be the one thing the Bush gang was good at. The Bush-Cheney ticket, after all, was the first ticket in American history to feature, not one, but two former oil industry executives. Nevertheless, the gang that can’t shoot straight managed to screw up Iraq’s oil money. Badly.<\/p>\n

The details in this story are so painful, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
\n<\/p>\n

Willis helped run Iraq’s Transportation Ministry. He says government agencies and private contractors had to be paid in cash because Iraq’s banking system was decimated.<\/p>\n

“A lot of money did get to the Iraqi people at the grass-roots level, and a lot of it got into the wrong hands,” he says.<\/p>\n

In one photograph, Willis and colleagues showed off a $2 million payment to a security contractor.<\/p>\n

“It was time for payment,” he remembers. “We told them to come in and bring in a bag. It reminded me of the Wild West.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

American officials handed off $2 million — in cash — to a guy with a bag? This was the system the Bush administration came up with?<\/p>\n

And then there was this gem, which I couldn’t have made up if I tried:<\/p>\n

In one example of insufficient controls [over Iraqi oil money], the United States stored hundreds of millions of oil dollars in a vault in a Baghdad palace. Government auditors found that the key to the vault was kept “unsecured” — in a U.S. official’s backpack.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wait, it gets worse.<\/p>\n

Paul Bremer insisted that he’d improve controls by hiring a certified public accounting firm. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

[T]he United States gave the contract not to an accounting firm but to a tiny consulting company, Northstar — which NBC News found is headquartered at a private home near San Diego.<\/p>\n

“They violated the rules. They picked a contractor who didn’t meet their requirements,” says Paul Light, a government contracting expert and professor at New York University.<\/p>\n

Northstar’s president says the Pentagon knew Northstar was not a certified public accounting firm and that four experienced employees went to Iraq and did a good job. However, one audit notes that a single Northstar employee maintained spreadsheets tracking billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

Bremer would not comment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ultimately, how much money are we talking about here?<\/p>\n

NBC News has learned that a draft government audit faults the United States for “inadequate stewardship” of up to $8.8 billion in oil money, handed over to Iraq’s ministries but never fully accounted for.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyone who approves of the way the Bush administration is handling Iraq just isn’t paying attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before the war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq’s oil money would be key to a post-Saddam future. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, on March 27, 2003, said, “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” Donald Rumsfeld told Fortune Magazine in the fall of 2002 that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}