By GottaLaff



Remember all that loose cash in Iraq that floated around and was never accounted for? Bricks and bricks of $100 bills, millions stuffed into sacks that were never subjected to any oversight whatsoever? Millions that could have been put toward more, um, constructive projects? Yeah, me too:



Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents. Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry. It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run .

[T]ens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone , the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq...

Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials , according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases .

The reconstruction effort, intended to improve services and convince Iraqis of American good will, largely managed to do neither . The wider investigation raises the question of whether American corruption was a primary factor in damaging an effort whose failures have been ascribed to poor planning and unforeseen violence .

What kind of corruption? Why, thank you for asking. This kind:And guess what? They're inching up the military hierarchy to find answers:But wait! What's this I hear about blaming the failures in Iraq on poor planning and unforeseen violence? Not necessarily so, you say?Come on, how bad could it really be? Hint: Trick or treat!

The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy. “ You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill , a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “ And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances .”



Brick by brick...