Geov Parrish: The massive heist: Looting of Iraq is theft from Iraqi and American taxpayers that dwarfs the crimes of Adelphia and Ken Lay

"If you really want to steal a lot of money, and get away with it, skip the private sector and go with government work.
While business corruption headlines briefly resurface, virtually no attention has been paid to a trio of reports that, combined, paints a picture of occupied Iraq as a place where staggering amounts of public money have been botched or stolen with little or no oversight.
Let us start with the White House itself, which helpfully buried, on the Friday afternoon before a July 4 weekend, its release of a White House Office of Management and Budget report that reveals that of the nearly $20 billion earmarked by Congress for reconstruction in last fall's emergency Iraq spending bill, only a tidy $366 million has actually been spent. Breaking it down further, we discover that we wealthy Americans, in the 14 months we officially occupied Iraq, spent none of our own money on roads, nothing on hospitals and public health, nothing on clean water. The biggest chunks -- about $100 million each -- were spent on training Iraqi police and trying to restore constantly sabotaged electricity. What little progress has been made has come almost entirely from foreign governments, private donors, and Iraq's oil money.
No wonder the Iraqi public is furious with the Americans for not honoring our word on the street. Americans should be angry, too -- originally, in January, the OMB estimated that $10.3 billion of the money would be spent by now. And when that $87 billion was rammed through Congress last fall, it was with the insistent message that the money was needed immediately, if not sooner.
Never mind.
But Iraqis deserve to be even angrier about the fate of their own money. Iraqi oil exports, remember, were also supposed to be helping with both security and the reconstruction effort.
Problem is, nobody has any idea where the money's gone.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run agency that put itself out of business with the June 29 handover, didn't even get around to appointing an auditor for its funds until April of this year, after the date of its dissolution was already fixed and with far too little time left to track down its spending. The British NGO Christian Aid took a crack at it, issuing a report when the handover took place that reads, in part, as follows:
The billions of dollars of oil money that has already been transferred into the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority has effectively disappeared into a financial black hole... the US-controlled coalition in Baghdad is handing over power to an Iraqi government without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq's own money.
Now, that's not the $20 billion of American taxpayer money -- that's a different pool, being held up due to a combination of ineptitude, security concerns, and lawsuits launched by various Friends of Dick and George that didn't get the contracts they wanted.
But we spent Iraq's money -- after we took it from Iraq's public treasury -- and nobody knows where it's gone. Here's an educated guess: Halliburton. Here's another: Bechtel. . . ."