Monday, April 14, 2008

Iraqi Corruption


More than half of 1.3 billion of American taxpayer dollars has gone to support corruption, bribery, and even the Iraqi insurgency.
Secretary Rice says she knows nothing…

By de Andréa

The completion of an 18 month investigation by 60 minutes aired this past Sunday evening, has revealed such outrageous corruption as 31 members of Maliki staff dead, over 20 cases of corruption among the many ministries in Iraq, and the U.S. State Dept as well as Prime Minster Maliki himself quashing any investigation.

Half of 1.3 billion dollars earmarked for fighting the war on terror and restoring some semblance of life among the Iraqi people has been spent on bribes corruption and approximately 500 million wound up in the hands of the militia and the al Qaida insurgents. Moreover if that is not bad enough…what happened to the other half of the 1.3 billion? Well… nobody is talking…including Secretary of State Condi Rice.

It seems that Islam has one again pirated the U.S. just as it did off the shores of Tripoli. Maybe the president should sic the Marines on them just as the president did then.

According to Iraqi Judge Radhi al Radhi who now resides here in the U.S., the Maliki government is so corrupt that there are those in the government who kill anyone not on the inside of corruption such as the 31 dead members of Maliki’s staff. The 1.3 billion that was supposed to go to run all the ministries of government ended up in the personal pockets of government officials or worse in the hands of al Qaida; again we are obviously financing our enemy.

Incase you are wondering how these fiascos come about—it’s very simple, no one in our government knows who our enemy is, and if one does occasionally pop up here and there, as in the case of Stephen Coughlin, advisor to the Joints Chiefs of staff in the Pentagon, he is promptly fired for telling the truth and becoming politically incorrect. Moreover a Muslim enemy is then put in his place. Because, to be outspoken about who our enemy is, just isn’t how the game of political correctness is played.

Judge Radhi, who was imprisoned and tortured under Saddam Hussein, obtained arrest warrants for the former minister of defense and his top aides, who all fled the country. As Iraq's commissioner of public integrity, Radhi had one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. He launched investigations against 20 current and former ministers, alienating the political establishment to the point that the Iraqi parliament tried to fire him. He had 30 body guards because he and his family received constant death threats.

That was in 2006, today Radhi is living in exile from the U.S. supported corrupt Maliki government, and with his extended family is living in a small apartment with donated furniture in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The most public figure in Iraq's battle against corruption had finally been driven out of his job and his country and is now a refugee seeking legal asylum in the United States.

His would be assassins however are living a king’s life in such places as Paris France on your hard earned tax dollars. As this story unfolds one must wonder which government is more corrupt, the Islamic government of Iraq or the Islamic government of the U.S.

After this story leaked, Chairman Waxman of the U.S. Congress brought Secretary Condi Rise of the U.S. State Dept. to testify about the murders and corruption, and just where this 1.3 billion dollars went and why? Secretary Rice’s answer…”I don’t know. --- Later according to James Mattil State Dept Chief of Staff of Accountability said that “the documents had been made classified, possibly under the category of embarrassment”. I think, under the category of cover-up, but then what do I know, I am just an Op-ed writer.

To put this scandalous bit of corruption into perspective, this is the reason why there are still very little services in Iraq such as electricity water gas etc and more importantly so-called Iraqi defense forces.

But the State Department's decision to try and cover-up and bury the report didn't change the facts in Iraq. Mattil says the corruption involves outright theft of government funds, and bribery, with some of the money finding its way into the hands of insurgents or Iraqi militias. "In other cases, it is the militias and insurgents themselves who control some of the ministries, who are involved in the corruption and funding their own activities with stolen American dollars," Mattil said.
Asked if this is known and condoned by Prime Minister Maliki, James Mattil said, "It's known and tolerated by the prime minister and other officials within the government, and they are aware of the level of corruption.
"The point that must be clear is that the American and the Iraqi funds are now going to the militias. And both Iraqis and the Americans are being killed with that. And this is the big problem," Judge Radhi said. The situation got so bad; Radhi says his investigators could not even enter certain government buildings.
Asked if his investigators were allowed into Ministry of Health for example, Radhi said, "They entered the ministry and they conducted their investigations. But they were threatened to be kidnapped and killed.” So they stopped, and Radhi said the same thing happened with the Ministry of Oil.
Another reality is, there are few deterrents to corruption at the highest levels. Former Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan and his deputy Ziad Cattan were both convicted in absentia for their role in the Ministry of Defense scandal. And both are now living comfortably abroad on American tax payer’s money.

Warrants for the arrest of Cattan who now lives in a Paris mansion on 45 million of your dollars and former Defense Minister Shaalan have been sent to police agencies around the world, but there is not much chance of them being picked up and sent back to Iraq.
The same goes for former Electricity Minister Aiham Alsammarae, an Iraqi-American businessman who got himself tangled up in the hot wires of the Iraqi politics of stolen funds and bribery, and now faces prison time for mismanaging public funds. Alsammarae somehow escaped from Iraqi custody and made his way back to his home near Chicago. Yes…right here in the good ole U.S. of A. The only problem Kroft had in finding him a few months ago for an interview, was getting past the Chicago snowdrifts.

In the months before he left Iraq, Judge Radhi and his commission on public integrity began getting more and more interference from Prime Minster Maliki. "Maliki wrote a memo saying we could not recommend pressing charges against anyone from the president's office or from previous or current ministers." --- Radhi explained. "Who is corrupt in the ministries if it's not the ministers themselves? If we don't recommend they be tried, then corruption will stay as it is.” And it has…

According to James Mattil, Iraqi judge Radhi's former advisor at theState Department, the memo prohibited investigations of current or former high level Iraqi officials without the permission of the prime minister himself. "It has basically put a stop to any anti-corruption activities within the Iraqi government. And it came directly from the prime minister's office," Mattil said. "So the only way the prime minister could be investigated for corruption would be if he signed off on his own investigation. Oooh boy…
Mattil told Kroft he had seen the memo, and shared the information with his colleagues at the State Department immediately. When asked what the reaction was when he showed it to them, Mattil said, "Nothing that I am aware of."

THE BOTTOM LINE: Ever wonder why this war is taking so long? I mean after all we won two wars in the 1940’s against a more viable opponent in less time. One reason is that we new who the enemy was, another is, that we probably did not finance the enemies war against us. But most importantly we won the war before we attempted to set up a new government in the place of the corrupt government.

As you may recall in the case of Japan who also did not want to say UNCLE, we made Japan an offer it couldn’t refuse, either give it up, or there would be no more Japan. In the case of Iraq however, we have set up a new government using the remnants of the old corrupt one. Moreover this is before we have brought the war to an end and actually took control of the country as MacArthur did in Japan.

This indecently, is what happens when we have civilian’s micromanage a war as in the case of Vietnam. In the Second World War, which is the last war the U.S. has won by the way, MacArthur was in charge of the Pacific and Eisenhower was In charge of the war in Europe although Ike let Montgomery (Monty) think that he was in charge at least part of the time.

A further example if this, is when Truman fired MacArthur during the Korean war and took over the reins, we didn’t win that war either, and for those of you that think we did, then why are we still at war with North Korea today more than 50 years later? You see, in a stalemate nobody wins. One either wins or loses there is no in-between.

Getting back to Iraq,--- instead of the civilian government paying attention to the war right here in our own backyard as the US Constitution states in article IV section 4 …”and “ (the government) “shall protect each of them” (the States) against invasion; and…against domestic violence”. So while the civilian government is busy supporting the enemy in Iraq it is not doing its job of stopping the enemy invasion here at home.

We should immediately abolish the enemy’s corrupt government in Iraq and win this war with what ever it takes in the next week or so, and bring it under a dictatorship (something the Iraqis understand) and then carefully install a stable government, one that we may be able to work with, indoctrinate the children with our western culture and maybe in a generation or two, Iraq will be a free and liberated republic. This is incedently what MacArthur did in Japan. But trying to force democracy down the throats of an Islamic theocracy in the middle of a war is ludicrous at best. This insanity, as I have so often said, is because we just don’t know who this enemy is.

This mental blindness of the so-called war on terror is tantamount to saying that domestically we are at war with guns rather than criminals and if we could just get rid of guns then we would be rid of crime. [No we wouldn’t] Terror is simply one of the tools used by the Nation of Islam to bring about their 1400 year old agenda of world conquest and domination. We are not at war with the tool of terror; we are at war with the ideology of Islam, and unless we destroy the ideology we will not even make a dent in terror. Just as in the Second World War we were not at war with German tanks but with the ideology of Nazism.

If a small military surge works, then an even bigger surge will work even better. As genocidal as it may sound, we need to give the Iraqis a choice either give it up, or carpet-bomb the country. Which indecently is what we should have done in Falusia instead of knocking on each door and asking if there are any bad guys here? I can’t remember just how many of our guys we lost in that fiasco.

The point is, we have become too polite and politically correct to a fault, and if we don’t get a handle on winning this war against the Nation of Islam, both in the Middle east and here at home, and then bail out the Europeans again as usual; we will all soon be sliding into the abyss of Islamic Sharia law.

Personally I can handle terror; it’s the lack of the First Amendment that bothers me…

de Andréa

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