Bring them to Justice

Ginger Cruz, Deputy Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a US government office and Isam al-Khafaji, former reconstruction advisor to the Coalition Provision Authority and former director of Iraq Revenue Watch lined up on opposite sides on KCRW’s “To the Point” with Warren Olney (.mp3 download/podcast) (web site).

But in the end, both agreed on the most major issue. As Cruz, described, people don’t understand how in 1991, under Saddam Hussein’s regime, electricity was restored within a year of U.S. air raids, but NOW, under the occupation of the mighty U.S., three years have passed and utilities are occasionally functional at best.

Riverbend, whose postwar blog entries were recently released in the book Baghdad Burning, posted this in her blog last week:

The electricity schedule in what appears to be most areas in Baghdad is currently FIVE hours of no electricity for every one hour of electricity. It?s very frustrating considering the fact that it?s not really cool enough yet for excess electrical heater use- where is it all going? If the electrical situation is this bad now, what happens later when the populace starts needing more electricity?

Approximately 1/6 of the (taxpayers’) funds going to Iraq reconstruction is lost in the shuffle, due to corruption within the CPA and the corrupt middlemen and brokers. Many are already predicting it will completely eclipse and overshadow the UN oil-for-food scandal in terms of both finances and degree of fraudulence.

And it extends beyond Robert J. Stein, Phillip H. Bloom and their cartel. The Boston Globe highlighted last week that “11 investigators in Iraq [are] looking into more than 50?cases of graft involving civilians and the US military.”

Initially the grand plan was for a GLOBAL war on terror; but right now a good portion of our money is vanishing into thin air, while another chunk is inevitably being siphoned into anti-Democracy and anti-American hands, whether you call them sadaamists, insurgents, islamofascists, or pinko commies. There can be no democracy, at least as America envisions it, when corruption, theft, and the influx of foreign funds distracts from the top down. They don’t even have electricity yet.