Crickey, this really does seem to fall under the definition of what you could call a scandal. According to the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn one billion dollars was plundered from Iraq’s defence Ministry between June 2004 and February 2005 (during the government of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi):
“It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history,” Ali Allawi, Iraq’s Finance Minister, told The Independent. “Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal.”
11 Responses
Feed: A Fistful of Euros
September 19th, 2005 at 11:16 am
NOT ALEXANDER COCKBURN (The conspiracy nut)!
PATRICK COCKBURN! (The Indy’s excellent Iraq correspondent, Fisk’s heir apparent)
September 19th, 2005 at 11:48 am
God, thanks Alex, it’s changed. This isn’t a typo, it must be a brain freeze type Freudian slip!
September 19th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
“Church of England bishops have suggested Christian leaders apologise to Muslim leaders for the war in Iraq. A report from a working group of bishops says the war was one of a ‘long litany of errors’ relating to Iraq.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4259062.stm
Have they learned nothing from what happened to Thomas A Becket in 1170 and to Archbishop Cranmer in 1556?
September 19th, 2005 at 2:10 pm
“Church of England bishops have suggested Christian leaders apologise to Muslim leaders for the war in Iraq. A report from a working group of bishops says the war was one of a ‘long litany of errors’ relating to Iraq.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4259062.stm
Have the Bishops learned nothing from what happened to Thomas A Becket in 1170 and to Archbishop Cranmer in 1556?
September 19th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
There may be room to suppose that Prime Ministers are less murtherous than Kings.
September 19th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
From Juan Cole, Hannah Allam had the story at Knight Ridder back in August
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12360839.htm
September 19th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
I do remember all the treassure that was stolen from Iraq after the liberators liberated the country. That treassure was even more worth, so nothing new on the front…
September 19th, 2005 at 8:30 pm
You remember it Seesaw?! How do you remember something
that didn’t happen?
No, I think this is called making up a lie and then repeating
it over and over until people ‘know’ it’s ‘true.’
September 20th, 2005 at 12:16 am
You are certainly right Mark Amerman about making up lies, that is, alas, so often present in our days, and mostly in media we are surrounded with.
Obviously some visious cameramen and visious journalists made up such an lie when they showed the world all those pictures of museum, with the items being stolen, and of precious monuments like those in Babilon being devastated, by mere incident of course.
Alas all I can do here, where I live, is to watch CNN, SKY and BBC. And, of course I can surf, but there too I can only read English and German, I do not speak French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian… So, I will agree with you, I do not know anything that did happen or is happening in Iraq. I was not there, and what I see and here I can either believe or not, whatever…
September 20th, 2005 at 3:00 am
“Fisk’s heir apparent”
Is that a good thing?
September 20th, 2005 at 8:24 am
“Is that a good thing?”
I suppose that depends whether you like Fisk or not. Personally I think it is important that the press has a wide variety of opinions, so in that sense the fact that he’s there is positive for informed debate in a democratic society.
This is a factual story. There also seems to be earlier corroboration from another source. Cockburn’s opinions you can take or leave. I do think he provides another perspective on facts on the ground in Iraq which people need to take into account.
Obviously the implicit issue is that those governing Iraq now have little sympathy for Iyad Allawi and Paul Bremer. It seems they will lose no opportunity to try and trash them. For this reason it is important not to treat everything they say as gospel, but equally following what they say and do can give us some indication of the kind of government Iraq actually has now.
My guess is that these kinds of thing are being copiously ignored in some quarters because in order to try and defend Iyad Allawi you’d need to have a go at the actual incumbents.