Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

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Pigeon
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Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

Post by Pigeon » Thu Sep 15, 2011 3:15 am

This is from cryptome

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Peter Van Buren, 2011.

Peter Van Buren was a State Department officer in Iraq working with Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). He was based primarily at Forward Operating Base Hammer

Van Buren provides an informative, gorge-raising, black humorous, literal boots-on-the-ground, apology for "we have a war to fight, damn the cost, others will pay the bill" instigator of the current global panic about national debt ever bleaker humor. Rue with him being taken in by the natsec scam, laugh at each other and weep over your unpaid bills, service cutbacks, and tax duns for the cost of guiltless official malfeasance.

DoJ-celebrated task force prosecutions for terrorism, financial crime, health care fraud and child pornography are easy, small-time stuff compared to the great crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan forgiven by war-time exemptions, with very few cases for US official financial profligacy, negligence and wastage.

http://cryptome.org/0005/debt-humor.htm

Excerpt

[Van Buren was based primarily at FOB Hammer (as was Bradley Manning), a huge base 12 miles in circumference which was heavily compartmentalized to separate types of personnel: military, USG, OG (CIA), contractors, guards, servants.]

Pages 46-49:

Money and Our Meth Habit

We lacked a lot of things in Iraq: flush toilets, fresh vegetables, the comfort of family members nearby, and of course adult supervision, strategic guidance, and common sense. Like Guns N' Roses' budget for meth after a new hit, the one thing we did not lack was money. There was money everywhere. A soldier recalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up off the runway by forklifts (operated by soldiers who would make less in their lifetimes than what was on their skids at that moment). You couldn't walk around a corner without stumbling over bales of money; the place was lousy with it. In my twenty-three years working for the State Department, we never had enough money. We were always being told to "do more with less," as if slogans were cash. Now there was literally more money than we could spend. It was weird.

We'd be watching the news from home about foreclosures, and I'd be reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks, while signing off on tens of thousands of dollars for stuff in Iraq. At one point we were tasked to give out microgrants, $5,000 in actual cash handed to an Iraqi to "open a business," no strings attached. If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball, it was no matter. We wondered among ourselves whether we shouldn't be running a PRT in Detroit or New Orleans instead of Baghdad. In addition to the $63 billion Congress had handed us for Iraq's reconstruction, we also had some $91 billion of captured Iraqi funds (that were mostly misplaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority), plus another $18 billion donated by countries such as Japan and South Korea. In 2009, we had another $387 million for aid to internal refugees that paid for many reconstruction-like projects. If that was not enough, over a billion additional US dollars were spent on operating costs for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. By comparison, the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion, respectively.

While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire, at the local level money was spent via two programs: CERP and QRF. CERP was Army money, the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Though originally provided to address emergency humanitarian needs and short-term counterinsurgency costs, this nearly unlimited pool of cash came to be spent on reconstruction. The local US Army Commander could himself approve projects up to $200,000, with almost no technical or policy oversight. Accounting was fast and loose; a 2009 audit, for example, found the Army could not account for $8.7 billion in funds. It might have been stolen or just lost; no one will ever know. The Army shared its money with us at the ePRTs, partly out of generosity, partly out of pity, and partly because individual military units were graded on how much cash they spent -- more money spent meant more reconstruction kudos in evaluation reports.


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Dr Exile
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Re: Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

Post by Dr Exile » Thu Sep 15, 2011 12:41 pm

And Americans used to laugh at Mexican corruption.
Credo quia absurdum.

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Royal
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Re: Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

Post by Royal » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:30 pm

Did someone say black humor?!?


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Royal
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Re: Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

Post by Royal » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:33 pm

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Royal
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Re: Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

Post by Royal » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:34 pm

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Re: Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

Post by Royal » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:35 pm

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