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Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.

The LA Times has a new report on that cash, and incredibly, it seems that $6.6 billion has just been...stolen.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

In yet another example of stunning incompetence on the part of the Bush administration:

The U.S. cash airlift was a desperation measure, organized when the Bush administration was eager to restore government services and a shattered economy to give Iraqis confidence that the new order would be a drastic improvement on Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The White House decided to use the money in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq, which was created by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hold money amassed during the years when Hussein's regime was under crippling economic and trade sanctions.

And because it is technically Iraq's money, they are threatening lawsuits to recover it, despite indications that Iraqis probably made off with the bulk of it.

The whole cash drop was just an incredibly stupid idea. What did the Bushies expect? That they could drop $100 bills on Iraq and they'd just stay there in the street until authorized personnel picked them up and used them in altruistic ways?

Or were they actually hoping that money would be stolen and unrecoverable? I'd love to know how much of it went into Dick Cheney's pocket. Or Erik Prince's.

How do you "lose" nearly $7 billion dollars?

I like it when people use creativity to make their point, don't you?

NEW YORK, Jan 1 (Reuters) - A statue stolen last month from Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff's Florida home has been returned undamaged, and with a note attached, to a country club where the accused swindler is a member, Palm Beach police said on Thursday.

The attached note read: "Bernie the Swindler, Lesson: Return stolen property to rightful owners. Signed by The Educators," according to police.

"We don't know who that is," Sgt. Chris Proscia told Reuters. "We think it was done just to prove a point."

Yes, they were lying about al Qaqaa

Just three days too late for it to do any good, the Los Angeles Times breaks the definitive story on al Qaeda. Not only did the theft of the high explosive go on after the invasion, the looting went on while we had troops at the site. There were just too many looters, and too few troops. They asked for backup but didn't get any.

Of course there's no way this information wasn't available to the Defense Department, and the White House, three weeks ago. The story isn't just based on soldiers in the field. Mark Mazzetti reports:

"That site was just abandoned by the 101st Airborne, and there was never a physical handoff by the 101st to the Marines. They just left," said a senior officer who worked in the top Marine command post in Iraq at the time. "We knew these sites were being looted, but there was nothing we could do about it."

No, the White House and the DoD civilians covered it up, telling various lies on the way (which their journalistic and blogospheric allies duly relayed to the public) just long enough to get the Beloved Leader past the election. And now they expect, almost certainly correctly, that everyone will now treat it as old news. The warbloggers will ignore it if they can't figure out some cockamamie way to convince themselves they've discredited it, while patting themselves on the back about how much more responsible and fair-minded they are than the mainstream media.

In the end, this one cover-up almost certainly didn't make the difference. But of course this wasn't the only cover-up. The cover-up of how Ken Lay and his friends got to write Administration energy policy worked. The Valerie Plame cover-up worked. And the result was that the Administration went back before the voters looking much cleaner and much more competent than it was or is.

Just remember, if their lips are moving, they're lying.

Ah yes, do we have issues still The American Street

WASHINGTON — In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material off the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers from one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.

Despite the protective shield of limited morality that the Fifty-One-Percenters used to maintain their denial of reality on Election Day, the truth will keep thwapping them in the head for weeks to come.

I’m looking forward to:

1) More details of the lousy troop support from the CiC.

2) More photos and statistics of the country we’re destroying to save it for a semblance of patriarchal strong-man democracy.

3) An end to the 15 month coverup of the Valerie Plame outing.

4) The rest of the Abu Ghraib picture show that’s being hidden.

5) Oil at $62-$63/bbl, within 7 months.

6) More intel insiders exposing the stuff Porter Goss is now covering up.

7) Any evidence at all that our hundred billion dollar Homeland Security Agency can deliver anything useful besides their stupid Crayola Alerts.

I’m not looking forward to:

8) The denial that will come when global terrorists attack again, that Bush bears any responsibility for at least two coordinated attacks on American soil. The other 42 presidents don’t bear that on their records. But I believe Bush will. And I believe the Fifty-One percenters will deceive themselves and say “God did this because some terrified teenager refused to carry her baby to term. God bless George Bush.”

Then they’ll demand that we nuke half the world as payback agains all the heathens.

I never would have dreamed that last one up on my own. God spoke to me and told me this was coming. He said: “Beware the False Prophet Number Forty Three; he shall surely lead the sheep to their slaughter.”

Here's an interesting piece to the Madoff statue story I missed the first time around:

The copper statue was reported stolen from Madoff's $9.2 million mansion on Dec. 22 - about a week after the Wall Street money man was accused of scamming investors in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

The statue does not appear to have any damage, and police are continuing to investigate the incident.

Frick said he was not aware of the 2004 German movie The Edukators, in which anti-capitalist activists break into the homes of rich people, move furniture around and leave notes that say "the days of plenty are over."

The activists kidnap a rich businessman, have ideological discussions about money and politics, and then let him go, possibly teaching him a lesson on ethics and morality.

"Interesting," Frick said when told of the film.

I see the potential for a lot of very interesting political theater in this new era...

Via Skimble, a most interesting theory:

I have yet to see this reported anywhere, but an anonymous commenter named trademonster on an investment forum said this (notice the dates):

01-09-06 06:49 AM

I've heard that SEC is going to shut down Madoff financial and all of their hedge funds for SEC violations. Can anyone confirm this?

And this:

01-14-06 02:52 PM

I actually got some update and found out that it's Spitzer's office doing the investigation not SEC. But I don't know what the scope of the investigation is.

Suddenly Spitzer's dalliances with a hooker don't seem quite as fundmentally important to the financial health of this country.

We need people who understand the system to police it. No matter how sanctimonious or egomaniacal you may find him, Spitzer understands the financial system. If these posts are true, somebody in power was more interested in the the details of Eliot Spitzer's transactions than Bernard L. Madoff's. They were obviously more interested in killing the watchdog than in catching the billionaire burglar.

And via Corrente, something even more interesting from Michael Isikoff's Newsweek story about the FISA whistleblower:

[Under the secret and illegal "Stellar Wind" program of domestic warrantless surveillance,] NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

Lambert asks an important question: How did the suspicious activity report on Spitzer's financial transaction get from the NSA to the FBI?

He also notes the convenient timing, because Spitzer at the time was looking into the monoline insurance companies - another important piece of the Wall St. crash.

Was the Bush administration using illegally obtained information to take down political enemies? Oh, I think it's a safe bet. And do you suppose they were deliberately trying to keep Spitzer from exposing extensive Wall St. fraud?

What do you think?

I can't find any independent verification of this, but if this is true, I have several areas of concern. This just seems like there is way too much potential for severe compromising of your individual privacy. Am I reading too much into this? Would you want all of your personal information collected and sent to a private company? As a victim of identity theft in the past, this makes me very, very nervous.

Wired (h/t OK)

A program to standardize state driver's licenses to create a de facto national I.D. should use a third-party -- most likely a private contractor -- to verify that a person is eligible for a driver's license or state identification card, according to a document provided to 27B by a privacy activist. The document appears to be a portion of the rules that Homeland Security is proposing for the program, which are currently being evaluated by the Office of Management and Budget before they are presented to the public for comment.
According to the document (.txt) that Bill Scannell of UnReal ID says he got from a government official (but which 27B has not yet verified), DHS suggests that there are three models for states to follow to insure that a person has the right documents and does not have a driver's license in another state. One is to let them figure out how to communicate with each other. The second is to create a federated model, where a central service includes pointers to records in all the states' databases which all have a standard lookup interface. This is similar architecture to the one used for trucking licenses, where a state can find information about an applicant by checking a central clearinghouse that doesn't store all the records, but simply knows where to look for records.
The third, and favored option, according to the document, is to have a centralized service, likely a private company, that vets anyone seeking to get a driver's license. The state would collect the necessary information -- including social security numbers, certified birth certificate and possibly fingerprints -- send it along to the service, which would then check all the states, run the name against watchlists, verify the social security number through the immigrant-verification program known as SAVE and verify birth certificate information through EVVE.

I'm surprised this guy isn't on the short list for a Medal of Freedom.

AP via Houston Chronicle:

Tens of millions of dollars and repeated security reviews haven't stopped embarrassing security breakdowns in the government's nuclear weapons program - and now the man in charge has been sent packing.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman on Thursday ousted the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile and oversees the nation's weapons research laboratories.

"I have decided it is time for new leadership at the NNSA," Bodman said in announcing that the agency's chief, Linton Brooks, would resign within the month.

Brooks, a former ambassador and arms control negotiator, said he accepted the decision, one he understood was "based on the principle of accountability that should govern all public service."

Continue reading »

YahooNews :

Wisconsin's revenue agency said Friday that it sent as many as 170,000 forms to taxpayers with mailing labels mistakenly printed with their Social Security numbers.

The state Department of Revenue was scrambling to alert taxpayers to be on the lookout for the mailings.

"We want to prevent any chance identity theft might occur," department spokeswoman Meredith Helgerson said. An agency news release included an apology to taxpayers and a statement that steps were being taken "to make sure that this will never happen again."

The misprinted labels, blamed on a computer error while they were being prepared, went to taxpayers who have used the basic Form 1, a long paper form for individuals, according to the department.

As someone who has been a victim of identity theft, I don't find this kind of mistake very humorous, and I hope this doesn't result in too much damage for the taxpayers involved. I am intrigued by the framing of this as a little "computer error". I've done mailing labels. Computers generally don't make errors like this, that's an operator error. Is it that hard in this day and age to just accept responsibility for a screw up?

Watch out "Grand Theft Auto" and "Resident Evil," there's a new player in town and he's got a bible.

"The fourth annual Christian Game Developers Conference was held in Portland, Ore., last month, and attendees expressed blissful optimism that games "glorifying God" can not only become a popular alternative in the "Christian" market, but edge into the mainstream....read on"

Please list some of the titles you'd like to see.