Where is Iraq’s $6.6 Billion?
More than $6 billion of Iraq money is missing, and U.S. officials for the first time saying it could possibly be due to theft. At the start of the Iraq War back in 2003, the U.S. held billions of dollars of Iraq funds seized during the invasion. Once Saddam Hussein was ousted, President George W. Bush had billions of dollars in cash flown from the Federal Reserve currency repository in New Jersey to Baghdad to help rebuild infrastructure and the support of the Iraqi people. In all the chaos of the beginning of the war, records were not meticulously kept, and it was first believed the $6.6 billion was lost because of an error in accounting. It is now believed the funds were stolen, and the Iraqi government is threatening to sue if the money is not found. “The Coalition Provisional Authority did not adequately oversee that money,” says Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. “This was cash that was taken out of the federal reserve bank where all Iraqi oil revenues were deposited and still are, and then flown to Baghdad over the course of 2003 and 2004 and delivered through the CPA to the interim Iraqi government and the Central Bank of Iraq… the real issue is what happened to that money after it was delivered.”
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