Wed, 07 Feb 2007

U.S. sent pallets of cash to Baghdad

The next "conservative" Republican that opens his mouth about the evils of "income redistribution" should get a black eye after this ... un-freaking believable.

Reuters - The U.S. Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

Update: A commenter points out that I skipped the second paragraph of the Yahoo piece linked above -

The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.

So to a certain extent, I suppose, it is indeed Iraqi money. The paragraph was skipped as it didn't show up in my RSS feed, and I already had caught the gist of the tale from other sources, none of which mentioned the alleged source of the funds.

So why was it in dollars and not dinars? Why not transfer via wire to the central bank (which was functioning by December of 2003)?

But I do stand corrected: if this was in fact Iraqi cash, then no income redistribution took place. I guess I'll have to wait for the next round of Republican corporate welfare to excoriate them properly ...

/Politics | 1 writeback | permanent link

On 2/7/2007 21:33:37
Murstein wrote

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