State Department: Hiding Corruption in Iraq

In response to my recent article “How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan — or America,” originally published on TomDispatch.com and Huffington Post, the site CommonDreams featured this very interesting comment by Art Brennan:





I was the director of the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT) at the US Embassy in Baghdad during the summer of 2007. That summer, I signed and OAT issued an 80 page report on the corruption within each of 33 Iraqi government ministries.

The report was retroactively classified by Condi Rice to keep Congress from discussing it and the people of the US from knowing about the evidence of 18 billion dollars stolen, lost and wasted.

Later in July of 2007, a group of US law enforcement officers asked to meet with me in my office at the palace (US Embassy Annex). They explained that the director of the Iraqi equivalent of the FBI (Judge Radhi al Radhi) was going to be murdered because he would not stop investigating the Iraqi Ministries. His house had been rocketed twice and 31 of his personnel had been murdered.

I confronted [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker about this. I sponsored Iraqis for asylum and they were granted asylum. And my chief of staff, James Mattil and I both testified to House and Senate Committees about the recklessness and negligence of our “preeminent statesman” Ryan Crocker and the Department of State in Iraq. Obama was subsequently elected and the same group of corrupt incompetents were nominated by Obama and confirmed by the Senate to preside over the similar corruption and murder in Afghanistan. The only consequence for the group of us who stood up and testified was that we were blacklisted by the US Embassy.

I am a US Army veteran and a retired New Hampshire Superior Court judge. Nancy and I have been active with Stop the Machine at Freedom Plaza in DC and both have been arrested there. We are members of Veterans for Peace and the Veterans Peace Team (VPT). Next week, I go on trial in NYC for VPT’s part in a peaceful demonstration by OWS at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Lower Manhattan. I write these words because I think we have to speak, even when no one in Congress or the White House is listening and most people in the US simply don’t care. I know people reading this do care.

















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