12 BILLION IN CASH, LOST IN THE DESERT

Yea. Look at those pallets of $100 bills. Wow. I bet that money was free. It happened during Bush so it couldn’t have been taxpayer money.

The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.
The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. “The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they’re true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?”

So… did we loose this money? You could argue that we paid for a temporary peace for PR reasons, in order to account for SOME of the cash, but then it’d cut against your ‘freedom and democracy’ narrative about Iraq. Decisions decisions…

Also, I think a ‘tonne’ is two ‘tons’. Anyone know the deal with the British ‘tonnes’?