Hundreds of TONS of cash - down the toilet

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did." - Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

In case you missed it... on Thursday, White House spokesman Tony Snow was asked, what went wrong in Iraq? His response: "I'm not sure anything went wrong." (Hmmm... reminds me of this book).

Imagine if you will, so much cash that it required forklifts to lift the giant pallets of bills weighing hundreds of tons onto military transport planes. These shipments, the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, were sent into Iraq with no system to account for it. About a third of the reconstruction budget for 2003 is unaccounted for: $12 billion, (... and that's just '03). The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State Department officials condoned & allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses, payments for shoddy work & work never done. More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable or unsupported. So what did we get for our $ ?

An example, the $75 million Baghdad Police Academy was so poorly built that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks.

"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure, the Baghdad police academy is a disaster."

-Stuart W. Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction

Imagine the benefits to America that could have come from the half-trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war (...with no end in sight) !! For example: John Kerry's plan to provide American children with health insurance for a decade costs about half of what America has spent in Iraq... so far. 1 in 3 American kids go without health insurance and we are sending pallets of cash to Iraq with no way to account for it? Meanwhile, no-bid war contractors like GW Bush's Uncle Bucky are profiteering $millions from the Iraq war.

But... Tony Snow says he's not sure anything went wrong in Iraq.
Nice!