And For Our Next Magic Trick…

The  L.A. Times reports that the government sometimes loses things.  This time, it lost $6.6 billion dollars in shrink-wrapped $100 bills.  Then it lost more.


After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.


Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.


Auditors, right on top of things, has finally reached the conclusion that something might be wrong.


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.”


You may remember that there has been some talk lately about the deficit and national debt.  While factions fought over what to cut, nobody suggested that maybe the price of the vanity war in Iraq was a problem, or that the military was having some difficulty in keeping its eye on shrink-wrapped cargo.  Does it seem like somebody should have mentioned this?

Of course, we regularly hear employees of another branch of government  rail at the horrors of such insidious and outrageous crimes as insider trading, though lost in the hyperbole is the ability to identify a single victim or an actual dollar anyone lost in the process.  Still, there are terrible crimes that corrupt the American way of life.  I know because the government tells me so.

Yet I’m beginning to have this nagging sense that for all the righteousness expressed by very serious prosecutors doing everything they can to protect us from the evil men and women who might steal our money, the government itself isn’t doing a very good job of handling the public fisc.  When so many things we could use from government are on the chopping block, it’s disconcerting to learn that they are sending C-130 Hercules cargo planes filled with bundles of cash to Baghdad Airport, and even more disconcerting to learn that once at the airport, the cargo just disappears.

Not even my old school chum David Copperfield can pull off that magic trick.

If the government is going to send planes filled with cash to airports, and not get too bent out of shape if the shrink-wrapped bundles disappear, maybe they could send a few to Kennedy Airport?

H/T Turley

2 thoughts on “And For Our Next Magic Trick…

  1. Eric L. Mayer

    While there, I went digging around a bit–kind of like in the book/movie “Holes.”

    Didn’t find anything.

    But, once I score another case in Iraq, rest assured my mission will continue.

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