Blind Oversight

July 27, 2010

Long ago, when in high school, I lost almost $100 somewhere after a shopping trip.
My mother — always aware of how a bit means a lot, and even with the money being my own hard-earned cash — went nearly ballistic.

Nowadays, nothing of the sort happens, no fits pitched, no hand-wringing, no talking about the value of resources — even as more and way-more of my own money (along with a shitload of other US peoples money) has once again been found to have gone missing in that vast, horrifying, and ugly orifice of Iraq — and no one appears to give a fat-rat’s-ass.
US treasure down the Middle East, war-torn, rabbit hole:

A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.

The words, ‘massive funds‘ is some kind of a WTF understatement — does anyone have any kind of grip on $9.1 billion?

The report released just last week by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction is seemingly the second such audits from that august group on big-bucks disappearing — in 2005 $9 billion in reconstruction funds just vanished “in the midst of a war” between October 2003 and June 2004.
Gobs and gobs of cash — Heady days them with literally tons of greenbacks pouring the country, one flight alone in December 2003 contained $1.5 billion in cash, the largest single Federal Reserve payout in US history.
Read a good wrap of that particular tale of horror here.

A couple years after that fiasco, a congressional report found the Pentagon lost nearly 200,000 weapons in 2006 — including 185,000 AK-47 rifles, the vaulted, weapon-of-choice for Mid East insurgents — amidst budgets then of $19.2 billion for Iraqi security forces along with another $2 billion for training and equipping Iraqi troops.

And how about the now-nine-year-old original war in that war on terror, Afghanistan — more of the fricking same.
Last week, a federal auditor called out an “outrageous waste of taxpayer money” in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, building all kinds of structures without a grain foresight or sense.

Just as US House approved another $59 billion for the Afghan war, take a look at this as the cash flows like water into the modern horrors of US conflicts since 2001 –and all that waste in blood and treasure.

My mother would have pitched a shit fit.

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