In a startling new expose, Vanity Fair’s contributing editors Donald Barlett and James Steele, followed the money trail of $12 billion of US currency earmarked for the Coalition Provisional Authority for reconstruction between April 2003 and June 2004. To date, $9 billion have vanished. The US Federal Reserve Bank were the custodians of the funds which were Iraqi assets impounded during Gulf War 1 by the United Nations.
The money was in the form of $100 bills packed into large pallets and loaded onto cargo planes bound for the Iraqi capital. Once the money arrived in Baghdad it seems to have been given away to American contractors on a basis of carry-as-much-as-like in the largest giveaway that the world has ever known with the total absence of any auditing efforts. The Coalition Provisional Authority initials, CPA, did not retain the services of a single certified public accountant. What is infinitely worse is the CPA was in fact a rogue agency created at the behest of the Pentagon and is therefore not accountable for its gross malfeasance. All efforts to recover the money have failed because the US government claims the CPA was not an entity of the US government. The Pentagon awarded the auditing contract to NorthStar Consultants, a shady corporation run out of a million-dollar home in La Jolla, California, with a post office box in Nassau, Bahamas. Who said crime doesn’t pay?
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