Pay Any Price

An excerpt from James Risen's new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

Within weeks of the invasion [of Iraq], American troops scouring one of Saddam’s palaces discovered aluminum boxes filled with cash. Each box was stuffed with about $4 million in $100 bills. There were many, many boxes.

The cashboxes were collected and secretly flown to a U.S. base in Kuwait, where the bills were counted by military personnel.

[...]

Not long after that, the Treasury team learned from senior officials of the Iraqi Central Bank that just before the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein had issued orders to withdraw $1 billion in cash from the central bank, and that the money had been handed over to Qusay Hussein, one of Saddam’s sons, who had arranged to have the cash trucked away. The Treasury officials soon realized that the cash discovered by American troops and flown to Kuwait was the same money Qusay Hussein had taken from the central bank.

Undersecretary John Taylor and his aides at Treasury said that the money belonged to the Central Bank of Iraq. He argued that the U.S. military should send it back to allow the central bank to maintain steady foreign currency reserves to help stabilize Iraq’s shaky economy.

[...]

But the [Bush] White House, the Pentagon, and the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S.-led organization that had just taken over the occupation of Iraq from Jay Garner’s ORHA team, did not agree. The U.S. officials decided that they were simply going to keep the money.

[...]

The Coalition Provisional Authority decided to dole it out to American military commanders as cash that they could use as they saw fit. The money became the original basis for what was known in the U.S. military as the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, or CERP funds, used by American officers to pay for local reconstruction projects—or to pay off local officials to keep them from siding with the insurgency

[...]

American officials came up with alternative explanations for the money’s origins in order to justify taking it. A lengthy article in the U.S. military’s Joint Forces Quarterly by Lt. Col. Mark Martins, a senior military lawyer, described the funds as “ill-gotten Baathist Party cash discovered by U.S. forces.”

[...]

. The CPA and the U.S. military soon began to spread the cash around Iraq promiscuously, doling out bricks of $100 bills to military commanders with scant recordkeeping, receipts, or controls. CERP quickly became the most popular program among U.S. officers in Iraq. But it also placed unimaginable temptation right in front of American soldiers in the field. The money quickly began to disappear into the rucksacks and footlockers of the officers and enlisted personnel who had access to it; some was mailed home to wives and girlfriends. The stealing in Iraq reached epic proportions.

If you don't know who James Risen is, he's the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who has been under subpoena from the US DOJ since 2008 to testify in a lawsuit in which he is being asked to reveal a source. He has fought the subpoena and refuses to name his source, but his Supreme Court appeal was denied in June of this year. Attorney General Eric Holder famously said no reporter would be going to jail for doing his job under Holder's watch. Holder, of course, recently announced his intention to resign as soon as a replacement is confirmed. Stay tuned.