Panorama - Organised crime into Iraq for 23 billion dollars

[Mark Gobell]

Press Releases

Panorama: Daylight Robbery - What Happened To The $23billion?

Category: News; BBC One

Date: 10.06.2008

An investigation by BBC One's Panorama estimates the amount of money stolen, lost or just not properly accounted for in Iraq could be as high as $23billion.

Panorama: Daylight Robbery - What Happened To The $23billion?, will be broadcast tonight at 9pm on BBC One.

For the first time the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.

Based on information from these sources, the programme can reveal that as much as $23billion is not properly accounted for in Iraq.

In the run-up to the invasion one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth $7billion that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company with links to the White House. Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.

Bunnie Greenhouse, a former US Army Procurement Executive, was assured by Pentagon officials the imminent invasion justified the lack of competition.

"It was absolutely the most blatant disregard for the federal procurement law I had ever seen in all the years I have worked in government contracting," she says.

During the course of her investigation, reporter Jane Corbin discovers that 70 cases exposing fraud and waste in Iraq are gagged by the US government - preventing the American public knowing the real scale of the problem and the involvement of some of the biggest names in corporate America.

However, the President's Democrat opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.

Henry Waxmann, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, criticises the funding of the reconstruction of Iraq. He says: "But the money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, it's egregious. It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."

US Congress appointed Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, to find out what was happening to the money.

"The challenge right out of the box was the expenditure of an enormous amount of US tax-payer dollars; the largest foreign aid programme since the Marshall plan," he says.

"Fraud is the smallest component today. But waste and mismanagement has been the challenge. And that's largely driven by the security environment over there".

Panorama's investigation also found that an Iraqi exile, who lived in a house in Acton, west London, was involved in major illegal profiteering.

Hazem Shalaan - who was appointed to the new Iraqi government as Minister of Defence in 2004 - and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2 billion out of the Ministry. They bought old military equipment from Poland but claimed for top class weapons. Meanwhile they diverted money through a company called appropriately 'the ever flowing spring' into their own accounts.

Judge Radhi al Radhi of Iraq's Commission for Public Integrity says: "I believe these people are criminals. They failed to rebuild the Ministry of Defence, and as a result the violence and the bloodshed went on and on – the murder of Iraqis and foreigners continues and they bear responsibility."

Shalaan was sentenced to two jail terms but fled Iraq and claims that it was all a plot against him by pro-Iranian MPs in the government. There is an Interpol arrest out for him but he is on the run – using a private jet to move around the globe. He still owns commercial properties in the Marble Arch area of London.

Meanwhile the judge is a penniless outcast in America – he paid the price for blowing the whistle on Iraqi officials like Shalaan. His home was targeted by a missile and 31 of his investigators have been killed.

Panorama: Daylight Robbery - What Happened To The $23billion? will be broadcast on BBC One on Tuesday June 10 2008 from 9.00 to 10.00pm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/06_june/10  /panorama.shtml

[Newspeak International]

[TonyGosling]

"When we first arrived in Iraq it reminded me of the Wild West"



Organised crime in to Iraq for 23 billion dollars - yes $23bn

"They make money out of chaos"

70 Iraq contract fraud cases gagged in the US


Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaiFYKkDbI

Full version

Link

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1289926868141910849

[kbo234]

Shocking programme. The corporations are criminal on a scale undreamt of by the Mafia.

The mind boggling thing is that this programme investigated losses (i.e. thefts) of $23 billion in Iraq but there is another scandal that is bigger by a factor of 100.......the $ 2.3 TRILLION that was announced as being untraceable, unaccounted for or 'lost within the system' (whatever the phrase was) by Donald Rumsfeld on 10th september 2001.

With this kind of money I reckon even I could take over parliament by buying out a few media empires and the sorry asses of a majority of our MP's (ever so discreetly, of course).

These are the effing people at the very top of our and US society.

'The Great Satan?'......not far off the truth these Ayrabs, are they?

[blackbear]

AlicetheKurious More than three years ago, those who wanted to know, knew exactly where the money was going -- and did nothing to stop it:

Cheney's boundless Iraq profiteering ....By The Age

07/31/05 "The Age" -- -- Things are going well in Iraq for the invaders. Well, at least for some people, such as US Vice-President Richard Cheney. He is receiving more than $US1 million ($A1.3 million) a year from Halliburton, the company of which he was CEO from 1995 to 2000, in "deferred remuneration" while he is VP. He is worth every penny.

Last week, two Democrat senators and a house member wrote to Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld asking if he knew about Halliburton's latest money-making dodge in Iraq. Keep in mind that Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root, have a nice little earner going in supplying support for the US Army and for, ostensibly, putting out oil well fires. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington counts Halliburton's windfall at more than $US10 billion - a little bit coming from the US Treasury but most coming from Iraqi oil revenue that is supposed to be used to reconstruct the country for the benefit of the people. The centre counts another 30 members of the Defence Policy Board with ties to American companies with $US76 billion (as of 2002) in largely uncontested and un-auditable military contracts.

The Democrats reckon that Halliburton may have overstepped even its sloppy moral line by making life impossible for another American company that has committed the crime of undercutting the Vice-President's company.

In their letter to Rumsfeld, the Democrats say that US company Lloyd-Owen International is being prevented from delivering fuel to Iraq from Kuwait (Who says the liberation hasn't been a success? What next? Ice to the Inuit?) by forcing LOI trucks to use a civilian crossing where the checks are so slow that the company can't get its 140 trucks a day through. The speedy, wave-'em-through military crossing is controlled by who? The Iraqi military? The US military? Nope, by the Vice-President's firm, which is also in the fuel delivery business.

The Democrats say that the LOI crime is delivering fuel to Iraq for 18 US cents a gallon while Halliburton provides the same service at $US1.30 a gallon. The LOI spokesman says he could understand if Halliburton simply doubled the price, to 36 US cents a gallon. But at $US1.30 a gallon even a Texas carpetbagger should blush.

Halliburton has a $US2.5 billion contract for managing the fuel distribution system in Iraq. The man from LOI says that "we have not, to date, seen a functioning KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root) piece of equipment to where we deliver". He also says that his chaps have only come across one KBR employee at these sites.

LOI needed Defence Department ID cards to make its deliveries and, in order to get them from - you guessed it - Halliburton, they had to make a delivery for Mr Cheney of construction material to Fallujah last month. The convoy was attacked and three men were killed and seven injured. KBR staff were ordered not to provide any assistance to the injured. "Many people volunteered to help, but were told not to by our management," according to a Halliburton employee. Presumably the convoy crew were a bunch of mercenaries, in Iraq to make a buck.

As George the Smaller told an audience at the West Point and Virginia Military Institute, America is "the single surviving model of human progress".

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9614.htm

More clues here:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=War_profiteering

http://www.alternet.org/story/15512/

[TonyGosling]

The BBC and Google Video have taken it down!!
did anyone get a copy??
what are they doing!?!?!

[karlos]

Link