On July 1, 2004, a four engine Lockheed C-130 landed in Baghdad. Its load was 30 tons of $100 bills—a total of $2.4 billion.
This was one of 21 shipments of at least $12 billion in U.S. currency flown into Iraq in the year after the U.S. invasion.
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Donald Bartlett and James Steele, investigative reporters for Vanity Fair magazine, tried to track down what happened to all that money. They found a frenzy of corporate and personal greed with $9 billion still unaccounted for.
The Coalition Provisional Authority was created by U.S. government edict to serve as the colonial ruler of Iraq. It was not subject to any kind of oversight and became a dumping ground for Bush donors and campaign workers with no experience as colonial rulers.
The CPA—not to be confused with Certified Public Accountants—requested the cash as an alleged stopgap measure to run the Iraqi government.
While there were 8,206 security guards drawing paychecks from the CPA, only 602 actual persons could be found. Halliburton, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, charged the CPA for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers, although they served only 14,000.
Custer Battles, a security contractor formed by Scott Custer and Michael Battles, a former Army ranger and an ex-CIA agent, appeared in Baghdad. They immediately used their close ties to the White House to leverage a $16.5 million contract to protect civilian aircraft flights into the Baghdad International Airport, despite the fact that almost no civilian aircraft flew into Iraq.
After Custer Battles received the contract, it admitted that it did not have any start-up money and had no employees. The CPA gave the company $2 million in cash anyway. In the next year, it received more than $100 million in Iraq contracts
In September 2004, the air force barred Custer Battles from receiving any contracts. The company had charged the authority $400,000 for electricity that cost $74,000. It stole forklifts at Baghdad airport from Iraqi Airways, painted over the name, sold them to a shell company, and then charged the authority for leasing them from the shell company.
In 2006, a jury in Virginia ordered the company to pay $10 million in damages for defrauding the government. They found more than three dozen instances of Custer Battles using shell companies in the Cayman Islands to create phony invoices. A judge threw out the verdict thus protecting the corporation.
In one of his last official acts before leaving Iraq, Paul Bremer, then head of the CPA, issued an order that all coalition force members “shall be immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting for their Sending States.”
Private contractors also got the same get-out-of-jail-free card. Under U.S. government diktat, the Iraqi people have no means to call to justice any member of the military or any contractor no matter who they killed or tortured, or how many millions they stole.
Capitalist corporations act with impunity as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die and millions are displaced. The rampant corruption of the capitalists running the occupation should be pointed out—their misdeeds exposed for the world to see.
But, to win true justice for the Iraqi people, the greatest misdeed—the occupation itself—must end. Only the resistance of the Iraqi people, coupled with escalated anti-war action in the United States and throughout the world, can make that a reality.
