Outrage is too mild a word for this.
"Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives," the auditors said of U.S. officials in Hillah being unable to account for $97 million of the $120 million in Iraqi oil revenues earmarked for rebuilding projects.
This is the face of Republican run warfare. Corruption, war profiteering, tax cuts, troop levels being slashed, and incompetence on a level that is beyond terrifying. Bush's appointed idiots in charge run things like a third world country. What they don't steal, they break. What they don't break, they simply can't find.
Onwards to the flipside.
Dryly written audit reports describe the Coalition Provisional Authority's offices in the south-central city of Hillah being awash in bricks of $100 bills taken from a central vault without documentation.
It describes one agent who kept almost $700,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker and mentions a U.S. soldier who gambled away as much as $60,000 in reconstruction funds in the Philippines.
"Tens of millions of dollars in cash had gone in and out of the South-Central Region vault without any tracking of who deposited or withdrew the money, and why it was taken out," says a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is in the midst of a series of audits for the Pentagon and State Department.
It reads like a list from a banana republic. No accountability whatsoever. Cash simply VANISHING as people took it without explaining in writing where it was going and why. And Republican Retards WONDER why we never hear any good news about Iraq reconstruction.
Three Iraqis plummeted to their deaths in an elevator in the Hillah General Hospital that was certified to have been replaced by a contractor who received $662,800.
Also in Hillah, occupation officials spent $108,140 to replace pumps and fix the city's Olympic swimming pool. But the contractor merely polished the old plumbing to make it look new and collected his money.
When the pool was filled, the water came out a murky brown and the pool's reopening had to be canceled.
Two occupation authority field agents responsible for paying contractors left Iraq without accounting for more than $700,000 each. When auditors confronted their manager and asked where the money was, the manger tried to clear one of the agents through false paperwork.
One report describes mismanagement of more than 2,000 small contracts in south-central Iraq worth $88 million. Occupation staffers or those they supervised handed out millions to companies that never submitted required competitive bids or that were paid for unfinished work.
_Only a quarter of $23 million entrusted to civilian and military project and contracting officers to pay contractors ever found its way to those contractors.
_One contractor was paid $14,000 on four separate occasions for the same job.
_Of $7.3 million spent on a police academy near Hillah, auditors could account for just $4 million. They said $1.3 million was wasted on overpriced or duplicate construction or equipment not delivered. More than $2 million was missing.
_U.S. personnel "needlessly disbursed more than $1.8 million" of the estimated $2.3 million spent for renovating the library in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
_The library contractor delivered only 18 of 68 personal computers called for and did not install Internet wiring or software. The computers worked only as stand-alones.
_The U.S.-led security transition command spent $945,000 for seven armored Mercedes-Benzes that were too lightly armored for Iraq. Auditors were able to account for only six of the cars.
In prior wars, people the US government caught doing this were shot. And for good reason. War profiteers are lowest of the low, right down there with soldiers who commit war crimes. But in Bushworld, this kind of behavior is expected and rewarded. And this was only for the southern part of Iraq, I expect the audits to follow to be much worse for the other regions.