The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says.
The missing records raise new questions about how the US government handled billions of dollars in Iraqi funds during the war.
The new report, the latest in a multi-year investigation by the inspector general into missing money in Iraq, paints a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records to back up the spending.
The Inspector General’s report concludes that the problem is simply one of “records management.” But the report explains the missing records make it impossible to conduct a complete accounting of what happened to the funds...[Full Article]
The US has withdrawn its troops from Iraq after nearly 8 years of a bloody war.
A leading US defense analyst has described the Iraq war as the “biggest mistake” in the history of the US military as the last patch of American troops withdraws from Baghdad.
The Iraq war and the subsequent occupation may ultimately come to be regarded as even a bigger mistake than the Vietnam war was, says an article by defense industry analyst Loren Thompson, published by Forbes . It also says the war failed to garner domestic support, which led to a “stark defeat” of American strategy in the country.
Referring to the West's false allegations of Baghdad possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a pretext for the war, the article said that the WMDs did not exist and were an illusion.
“We soon determined that another big reason for going [to war with Iraq], the supposed presence of Al Qaeda elements, was largely imaginary,” Thompson said.
He further described as ridiculous the former US President George W. Bush's stated objective to make way for the first “real democracy” in the Arab world.
Thompson added that the American troops departing Iraq are not going any farther away than neighboring Kuwait...[Full Article]
Even though it has spent at least $60 billion to destroy them, the Pentagon is losing the battle to combat the Improvised Explosive Devices(IEDs), which have accounted for two out of every three U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. This won’t stop the Pentagon, though, from spending another $10.1 billion on them next year as it struggles to reduce the human toll the IEDs are taking in its longest-ever war.
While 10 to 15 percent of the IEDs that go off maim or kill U.S. soldiers, “The statistical likelihood of (an enemy) being killed or hurt while planting a bomb was close to zero”, writes Andrew Cockburn in the November issue of Harper’s magazine. By May, 2007, he reported, some 70,000 IEDs were planted in Iraq alone.
“Assembled from cooking pots, mobile phones, flashlight batteries, farm fertilizer, and other commonplace items, these home-made weapons have altered the course of the Iraqi and Afghan wars,” Cockburn writes. “They are also as far removed from our industrial approach to warfare as it is possible to be.”
According to Wikipedia, “In 2009, there were 7,228 IED attacks in Afghanistan, a 120 percent increase over 2008, and a record for the war.
Last year, “IED attacks in Afghanistan wounded 3,366 U.S. soldiers, which is nearly 60 percent of the total IED-wounded since the start of the war...Insurgents planted 14,661 IEDs in 2010, a 62 percent increase over the previous year,” Wikipedia said.
“As a general rule, we find about 50 percent of the IEDs before they go off,” General Michael Oates told Cockburn. The other 50 percent do detonate but of this group one-third do no harm because they were set incorrectly or were not sufficiently lethal or failed to pierce the protective gear of the troops, Oates continued. But, “Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent kill or harm our soldiers or our equipment, and that number’s been very stubborn since about 2004.”
Military analyst Rex Rivolo said the human networks employed making, planting and triggering the IEDs provide jobs for 15,000 workers so that it “counts as a definite growth sector.” IED-planters earn about $15 per job. Rivolo said the best way to inhibit their deployment was to operate low-flying light aircraft over areas where IEDs might be planted...[Full Article]
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Monday refused to dismiss a lawsuit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for creating policies that caused American civilians to be tortured by the U.S. military in Iraq.
In a 2 to 1 decision, the court ruled that the lawsuit filed by Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, two American citizens who were allegedly tortured at a U.S. military prison in Iraq in 2006, provided adequate evidence that Rumsfeld was personally responsible for their treatment and that Rumsfeld was not entitled to qualified immunity.
"If the plaintiffs’ allegations are true, two young American civilians were trying to do the right thing by becoming whistleblowers to the U.S. government, but found themselves detained in prison and tortured by their own government, without notice to their families and with no sign of when the harsh physical and psychological abuse would end," they wrote their decision (PDF).
The court did not address the factual allegations made by Vance and Ertel, only the validity of their lawsuit. The former Bush and current Obama administration have tried to have the case dismissed.
The two young men moved to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 to help "rebuild the country and achieve democracy." They worked for a privately-owned security company called Shield Group Security.
Vance and Ertel began working with the FBI after they became suspicious that Shield Group Security was engaged in corruption and other illegal activities. The two men shared Shield Group Security documents with U.S. officials and reported their observations, including evidence that U.S. and Iraqi government officials were involved with illegal arms trading, stockpiling of weapons, and bribery...[Full Article]
A top former British intelligence official had misled the public about the former Iraqi regime's weapons program to pave the way for war, it is now revealed.
The then Prime Minister Tony Blair had assigned Sir John Scarlett to write the notorious dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on September 2002.
But, Scarlett, who was head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, sent a memo to Blair's foreign affairs adviser referring to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional".
Joint Intelligence Committee was duty-bound to give impartial intelligence-based advice to ministers, but in this case, intelligence has been misrepresented to make the case for war.
The former intelligence official Michael Laurie had told the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war that it was widely understood that the dossier was intended to make a case for war and misrepresented intelligence to this particular end. Now, Laurie's claimed are evidenced by the disclosure.
Later, it was found that Scarlett had willfully made up the intelligence to look as credible as possible and render a war on Iraq as certain. He was awarded by Tony Blair the post of foreign intelligence agency's chief in spite of all this...[Full Article]
$6.6 Billion Dollars Missing/Stolen from Money Flown Into Iraq by U.S. Military
Missing Iraq money may have been stolen, auditors say U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion, sent by the planeload in cash and intended for Iraq's reconstruction after the start of the war.
L.A. Times
Reporting from Washington—
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.
For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."...[Full Article]
Over 6 Billion Dollars Missing From Money Flown Into Iraq By U.S. Military! "Believed To Be Stolen!"
Deadline after deadline after meaningless withdrawal deadline passes
Steve Watson Prisonplanet.com April 8, 2011
The world’s media reacted with a collective shrug of the shoulders today as Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted that US troops are likely to stay in Iraq beyond 2011, making another scheduled withdrawal date nothing more than an empty meaningless promise.
There will be no withdrawal, because a permanent military occupation was agreed long ago.
The date for the final pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq keeps being pushed back further and further. Obama campaigned in 2008 on the promise that he would “immediately” withdraw troops from Iraq, then that was put back to June 2009, then it became August 2010, and now the date has been pushed back to the end of 2011. Every time a deadline gets close, the Obama administration simply insists that the situation is too unstable for withdrawal and the date is pushed back again.
Nevertheless, last August, with much sickening fanfare, the corporate media announced the “official” end to the occupation of Iraq.
“The last American combat troops left Iraq today, seven-and-a-half years after the US-led invasion, and two weeks ahead of President Barack Obama’s 31 August deadline for withdrawal from the country,” the London Guardian reported on August 19.
Buried in the recesses of such coverage was the fact that over 50,000 troops would remain behind to make up a “transition force”.
Even that number was misleading, however, given that the US still has over 100,00 contractors in Iraq.
In reality there is no plan to withdraw the military from Iraq, far from it, the plan is to stay there… forever.
In 2008 details of that agenda leaked to the media. It was revealed that the globalist neocon cabal in control of the government was actively seeking permanent occupation of the country, along with the construction of over 50 permanent bases and the right to launch pre-emptive military strikes on any country from inside Iraq.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country. [...]
Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.
Further details of the plot then emerged from senior Iraqi military sources who detailed the wish on behalf of the White House to control Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and secure the right to launch military campaigns against other countries from inside Iraq:
The military source added, “According to this agreement, the American forces will keep permanent military bases on Iraqi territory, and these will include Al Asad Military base in the Baghdadi area close to the Syrian border, Balad military base in northern Baghdad close to Iran, Habbaniyah base close to the town of Fallujah and the Ali Bin Abi Talib military base in the southern province of Nasiriyah close to the Iranian border.”
The military and both the Bush and Obama administrations have consistently denied any plans for permanent bases in Iraq, yet the Pentagon continues to spend billions on the construction of permanent bases. Of course, they are not referred to as “permanent”, rather they are “enduring” bases.
The push to permanently occupy Iraq did not subside with the election of Obama, who sent a special envoy last September to meet with senior Iraqi military and civilian officials to carve out a secret deal to keep troops in Iraq beyond 2011.
The U.S. has around 1,000 bases and military installations in 156 countries scattered around the world. The Pentagon does not plan to “drawdown” its presence in these countries anytime soon. In fact, it is continually looking for excuses to expand its presence, as we have seen with the recent incursion into Libya.
Obama’s two-faced con in announcing that there will be a full withdrawal from Iraq while in reality tens of thousands of troops and contractors will remain as an occupying force for years if not decades strikes at the root of Obama’s hypocrisy and the fact that, while posturing as a peace advocate, he is firmly in the pocket of the military-industrial complex.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.
MOSUL, Iraq — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said U.S. troops could remain in Iraq for years to come.
It would depend, he said, on what the Iraqis want and what Washington is willing to give.
Gates met soldiers of the 4th Advise and Assist Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, in Mosul, where — like the troops Gates met one day earlier in Baghdad — they asked if they would actually be staying beyond 2011, and if so, for how long.
“Well, I think that would be part of any negotiation,” Gates answered, “... whether it would be for a finite period of time, whether it would be negotiated that there be a further ramp down over a period of two or three years, or whether we would have a continuing advise-and-assist role that we have in a number of countries that just becomes part of a regular military-to-military relationship.”...[Full Article]
Libya gets attacked on the 8th anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. Why March 19th? It's the Eve of Ostara, an ancient pagan holiday that traditionally has blood sacrifices.
Now with all of the Libya war talk... what about the Radiation? Oh yeah, mainstream media will use Libya as a distraction... we talk about it here.
As well as a warning from former president Dwight D Eisenhower about having a permanent armament military industrial complex.
Next Saturday will mark the eighth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq. And after all this time, questions still remain as to why the United States launched the war in the first place. The Bush administration said it was because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
But there were no such weapons.
So how did U.S. intelligence get it so wrong? Incredibly, it was all because of one man - an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curve Ball" - who spun a web of lies which convinced America's top spies. His allegations became the crown jewel of the case Colin Powell made to the United Nations before the war.
Three years ago we told you part of this story. But we were missing one crucial element: Curve Ball himself.
We couldn't find him. Finally, we did and now we're going to introduce you to the man and ask you to ponder how anyone could ever have believed one word he said...[Full Article]
Bob Simon interviews the Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," whose false tale of a mobile, biological weapons program was the chief justification for invading Iraq.
Charles Duelfer, who had been a leader of the UN inspections team in Iraq during the 1990s, tells Bob Simon that faulty intelligence source Rafid Ahmed Alwan, also known as "Curveball," provided the U.S. with an argument for war.
UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer tells Bob Simon his theory of how intelligence source Rafid Ahmed Alwan fabricated his story about Iraqi WMDs. Alwan's story provided the U.S. with arguments for declaring war with Iraq.
Colin Powell was lied to and ‘manipulated’ into supporting the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night.
The former Secretary of State was deliberately not told that information he used to make his famous speech justifying the war was bogus, a former colleague claimed.
Instead the George W Bush White House abused his good reputation to give the push for war much-needed credibility.
The claims were made by Lawrence Wilkinson, Powell’s former chief of staff, in an angry and revealing interview.
He spoke out after the main source for Powell’s report justifying the Iraq invasion which he presented to the UN Security Council in February 2003 admitted he made the whole thing up...
Sometimes it takes me awhile to catch up on the news. Yesterday I finally read an article from the September 2010 issue of Service Contractor magazine that I'd been carrying for awhile in my Land's End canvas attaché bag.
The news: It concludes that more than 2,000 contractors have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Contractor deaths now represent over 25 percent of all U.S. fatalities" in those conflicts, write Steven Schooner and Collin Swan of the George Washington University Law School. (I would bet that contractor KIAs are far higher, since there is no indication that non-U.S. deaths have been tracked with any fidelity.)
In Iraq in both 2009 and 2010, and in Afghanistan in 2010, contractors were running ahead of the U.S. military in losses, the article indicates...
In an exclusive extract from his new book, A History of the World since 9/11, Dominic Streatfeild explains how despite expert warnings, the US let al-Qaida buy an arsenal of deadly weapons – then tried to cover it up...
A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.
The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys...
American forces decapitated an Iraqi last year on the order of their higher-up, show recently-exposed US military documents.
The troops operated under the command of an unnamed US major, who had been involved in the rape of an Iraqi female, showed one such document posted on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
The incident took place after the victim, the brother of the raped female, reportedly killed a military official in reprisal for the indecent assault...
Four senior Al-Qaeda detainees escaped from a US-controlled section of a tightly-guarded Iraqi prison overnight, Baghdad's security spokesman said on Thursday.
"Four senior members of Al-Qaeda escaped from Cropper prison on Wednesday evening," Major General Qassim Atta said, referring to the previous name for the facility which is now called Karkh prison.
Atta said the four were being held in a US-controlled section of the prison, which lies on Baghdad's outskirts, and added that authorities were investigating the escape.
A US military spokesman confirmed an escape had occurred but declined to give details.
The prison, previously named Camp Cropper, was officially handed over to the Iraqi government on July 15, but around 200 high-value detainees remained under US custody...
BAGHDAD — An Iraqi reality television program broadcast during Ramadan has been planting fake bombs in celebrities’ cars, having an Iraqi army checkpoint find them and terrifying the celebrities into thinking that they are headed for maximum security prison.
The show “Put Him in [Camp] Bucca” has drawn numerous protests but has stayed on air throughout the fasting month, broadcasting its “stings” on well-known Iraqi personalities.
All of them were ensnared by being invited to the headquarters of the private television station Al Baghdadia to be interviewed, but en route to the station a fake bomb would be planted in their car while they were being searched by Iraqi soldiers, who were in on the deception.
The unwitting celebrities are then secretly filmed, Candid-Camera-style, as they reacted with shock, disbelief and anger as fake checkpoint guards shout abuse at them: “Why do you want to blow us up?” “You are a terrorist.” “How much did they pay you to do it? You will be executed.”
The celebrities protest that they know nothing about the supposed bomb, that they are innocent and honorable Iraqi citizens, only to be told, “We have caught you red-handed, with the bomb in your car.”
How much of it is staged with the knowledge of the actors is unclear from the footage, which has been broadcast daily this month, with excerpts, reactions and comments on the channel’s Web site...
[Webmaster - This is supposed to be funny?! Well, that's OK...it still can't top the way that the United States of America REALLY got punked on9/11by the Neocon-Zionists...]
As the U.S. government moves its military into the next phase of Iraq’s occupation by claiming the war is over to pacify the American people (while merely renaming combat troops and surging mercenaries into the country), its plan to transfer biometric info to the Iraqi government is raising fears among Iraqis that it will be misused to carry out vendettas.
The U.S. military has been collecting biometric info on Iraqis over the past seven years since the war started and taken fingerprints and DNA from 80,000 Iraqi detainees. It also computerized Saddam Hussein’s fingerprint files, feeling the need to the include the enemies of the dictator it overthrew in the database.
“After the military’s incursion into Fallujah in 2004, US soldiers collected fingerprints and iris scans of every resident as they passed through checkpoints to return.”
Iraqis who assist the United States are afraid that allowing the Iraqi government to access this information will result in them being identified as traitors and targeted for revenge by subversive enemies within the Iraqi police.
By delivering “shock and awe” to Iraq and upturning Iraqi society, the United States can practice the policies that it is implementing at home, using the people of a conquered nation as test subjects. While the media brainwashes U.S. citizens to believe that the notion of privacy and rights are relics of the past, the government’s experience in Iraq helps it to quicker solidify the control grid once each new police state measure is introduced and hesitantly accepted by the public as “neccessary to its security”.
When federal investigators discovered that the manager of a Saudi Arabian company paid bribes to win two lucrative subcontracts supplying food to Americantroops in Iraq, they naturally wanted to know more. Did he act on his own? Had U.S. taxpayers been cheated?
Five years later, investigators are still largely in the dark.They suspect similar activities by other subcontractors may have tainted contracts worth up to $300 million. But the investigators are unable to uncover even basic information, such as how the manager of the Saudi company had come up with $133,000 in bribe money...
Members of the last American combat brigade in Iraq crossed into Kuwait early on Thursday as the military neared its Aug. 31 deadline to end combat operations.
WASHINGTON — As the United States military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void.
By October 2011, the State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police, a task that will largely be carried out by contractors. With no American soldiers to defuse sectarian tensions in northern Iraq, it will be up to American diplomats in two new $100 million outposts to head off potential confrontations between the Iraqi Army and Kurdish pesh merga forces.
To protect the civilians in a country that is still home to insurgents with Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000, according to administration officials who disclosed new details of the plan. Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said...
