It’s always just a few bad apples…

 

“It’s such a disservice to everyone else, that a few bad apples can create some large problems for everybody.” – Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, May 4, 2004.

The war in Iraq has brought much shame and dishonor to the United States. The Bush administration, for example, blamed the prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib on a “few bad apples”. While the evidence shows that senior officials in the Bush White House planned and authorized the use of torture, only those “few bad apples” have been held accountable.

Another such alleged “bad apple” is now on trial in Portland, Oregon. This time the trial is for theft.

The Oregonian reports U.S. Army Capt. Michael Dung Nguyen is accused of stealing more than $690,000 in cash from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program while stationed in Iraq between April 2007 and June 2008. Nguyen is 28 years old and a 2004 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

How is it that our government is able to hold men and women lower down on the chain of command responsible for their actions, but not hold accountable the men and women who are responsible for sending more than $690,000 in cash to Iraq in the first place?

Just a month ago, we learned that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command were all investigating senior military officers for the misuse of $125 billion of American-led Iraq reconstruction efforts. As the New York Times reported, the Inquiry on graft in Iraq focuses on U.S. officers.

As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.

Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone…

Mr. Stoffel, who died with a British associate, Joseph J. Wemple, in a burst of automatic gunfire on a dangerous highway north of Baghdad in December 2004 as he returned from a business meeting at a nearby military base. A previously unknown Iraqi group claimed responsibility for the killings, which remain unsolved.

This pizza box delivery method was how Capt. Nguyen allegedly shipped his haul of the loot back to the States. U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut explained the charges: “What’s alleged in the indictment, he took bulk cash he was responsible for paying to the Iraqi citizens as humanitarian aid in Iraq and sent it to the US in boxes, then put it in various bank accounts.”

Before he returned from Iraq, according to the indictment, Nguyen mailed home boxes filled with bundles of $100 bills. Immergut said Nguyen showed a “flagrant and reprehensible disregard” for military honor.

This pattern of federal prosecuting these “few bad apples” has been quite successful according to last month’s NY Times article:

Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases.

The “higher-level officials” are an Air Force Lt. Colonel and a retired U.S. Army Colonel, making these higher-ups only two and three ranks above the Army Captain on trial in Oregon and hardly what I’d describe as high-level officials in the Bush administration or U.S. military.

The Bush administration official explanation for any crime or misdeed done by Americans in Iraq was that there were committed by just a few people. This a “few bad apples” defense can be seen the explanation of Abu Ghraib by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said “These men and women, and the families who love and support them, deserve better than to have their sacrifices on behalf of our country sullied by the despicable actions of a few.”

Each time our government is content to round up a few more “bad apples” that supposedly caused all the problems, but yet the alleged misdeeds still continue to be uncovered. The nearly $700,000 allegedly stolen by Nguyen between 2007 and 2008, pales in comparison to the $9 billion that went missing between 2003 and 2004, when during the so-called ‘reconstruction’, billions of U.S. $100 bills were shrink-wrapped into bricks and shipped on pallets to Baghdad.

On May 7, 2003, George W. Bush appointed L. Paul Bremer III as his “personal representative” in Iraq. Four days later, Bremer was made head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Then, as a February 6, 2007 memorandum from the House Committee Oversight and Government Reform regarding “Cash Transfers to the Coalition Provisional Authority” (pdf) explained:

Between March 19, 2003, when U.S. forces invaded Iraq, and June 28, 2004, when the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority turned power over to the interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials disbursed or obligated nearly $20 billion in Iraqi funds, including nearly $12 billion in cash… Despite the magnitude of the sums involved, there has been little scrutiny of how U.S. officials managed these funds.

A day later, the committee held a hearing on the “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse In Iraq Reconstruction” (pdf). In his opening remarks, the committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman said:

In a 13 month period from May 2003 to June 2004, the Federal Reserve sent nearly $12 billion in cash, mainly in hundred dollar bills, from the United States to Iraq. To do that, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York had to pack 281 million individual bills including more than 107 hundred dollar bills onto wooden pallets to be shipped to Iraq. The cash weighed more than 363 tons and was loaded onto C-130 cargo planes to be flown into Baghdad. The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they are true.

Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?

The president’s “personal representative”, Paul Bremer, that’s who. As Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone on “The Great Iraq Swindle“:

One of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he’d have agents go to the various stashes – a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam’s former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch – withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills.

As Waxman said in the hearing:

This money, mainly hundred dollar bills, was packed into bricks, and each brick was worth $400,000 each… They were assembled into large pallets containing over $60 million in cash and flown into Iraq.

In December 2003, Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority asked for a shipment of $1.5 billion to be flown into Iraq, and a Federal Reserve official described this in an e-mail as the largest payout of U.S. currency in U.S. history. But this didn’t remain the largest for very long because in June, $2.4 billion was sent to Iraq, and this time a Federal Reserve official wrote, “Just when you think you have seen it all, the CPA is ordering $2,401,600,000 in currency.”

I guess back in 2003 before decades of conservative economic policies finally imploded, $2.4 billion still seemed like a lot of money.

While I am certainly glad the Feds are prosecuting Nguyen for the theft of nearly $700,000 from Iraq, I still hope his attorney, Susan Russell of the federal public defender’s office, gives him a good defense.

I am, however, left wondering why someone who steals so little gets caught while a man like Bremer, who lets $9 billion disappear, doesn’t get held accountable and is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

I wonder why when a preponderance of evidence implicates senior Bush administration officials of war crimes, our Department of Justice and Congress does little more than release old memorandums and talk about establishing truth commissions? Doesn’t anyone in Congress or the Obama administration see the disparity of justice here?

“Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” – George W. Bush, May 24, 2004.

With the release of nine Bush administration era legal opinions of the Office of Legal Council this week, we now know officially that Bush, himself, ruled under the ‘theory of presidential dictatorship‘.

When does our government start criminal investigations into the people who ran the United States of America between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009 that morally and economically bankrupted our country and justified a presidential dictatorship?

Why does the little guy lose his job, his home, and goes bankrupt when the big commercial banks and corporations get billion dollar hand outs? Why do the Feds spend their time going after the few bad apples when the whole system seems almost rotten to the core?

What the hell is wrong with this country?

 

^{Cross-posted at Daily Kos.}