The recent admission by the Obama administration that it had sent pallets of Swiss Francs and Euros in the value of $400 million to Iran aboard an unmarked cargo plane in January has sent shockwaves through the country.
Political commentators on both sides have labeled the money a ransom payment given in return for the release of four American hostages being held by the country.
The four “detainees” — journalist Jason Rezaian, U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, carpet designer Nosratollah Khosravi and pastor Saeed Abedini — have said they’re in good shape, but Abedini reported that the departure of their plane from Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport was held up while authorities there waited for another jet to arrive.
It’s now known that the jet in question was the unmarked cargo plane carrying the aforementioned money. This appears to be a smoking gun that confirms that the cash was not merely a reparation payment to the regime by the American government (as has been claimed by President Obama) but was, in fact, a quid pro quo outlay for the four men.
The fact that the money was in Swiss Francs and Euros is evidence that the American government wanted to skirt around laws which say that such payments to nations in U.S. dollars are illegal.
Some GOP Congressmen such as GOP Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have accused Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of helping to arrange for the payment during her tenure as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
Even President Obama’s own spokesman has acknowledged that some of the money is likely to wind up funding terrorism, which Iran is the world’s worst sponsor of, according to the U.S. State Department.
As questionable as the payment was, it almost unbelievably is not the first time the U.S. has flown pallets of cash to foreign countries in times of crisis or war.
Between 2003 and 2004 during the Iraq War, the administration of George W. Bush controversially flew planeloads’ worth of mostly U.S. $100 bills to Baghdad from New York totaling $12 billion, dwarfing the recent Iranian payment.
The total weight of the 281 million bills sent was 363 tons. The C-130 cargo transport planes departed once or twice each month for Iraq with as much as $2.4 billion aboard each trip. Fortunately, none of the transports were shot down or developed engine trouble.
Ostensibly, the money was meant for disbursement to U.S. contractors and Iraqi ministries, but as frequently happens with cash, full accounting for the money was lax at best.
Former California Congressman Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, fiercely criticized the move at the time, stating, “The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they’re true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?”
Waxman’s committee recorded the situation. “One [American-led] Coalition Provisional Authority official described an environment awash in $100 bills,” a committee memo states.
“One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack. They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75m in cash and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds… Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste … thousands of ‘ghost employees’ were receiving pay checks from Iraqi ministries under the CPA’s control. Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States.”
In at least one case, a single amount of $500 million was labeled ‘TBD,’ meaning its use was “to be determined.”
According to the special inspector general for Iraq’s reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, Jr., $8.8 billion of the money was given to Iraqi ministries “without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for.”
In fact, Bowen believes that the general lack of accounting extended to the entire $20 billion spent by the U.S. on Iraqi reconstruction. Oversight for the cash was supposed to have been done by a certified public accounting company, but according to Bowen instead was performed by “an obscure consulting firm called North Star Consultants Inc.
The firm was so small that it reportedly operates out of a private home in San Diego.” The firm “did not perform a review of internal controls as required by the contract,” admitted Bowen.
The financial advisor for the American reconstruction effort, retired U.S. Navy Admiral David Oliver, was interviewed as saying he didn’t know what happened to the $8.8 billion. “I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t.”
A follow-up by Bowen turned up between $1.2 billion and $1.6 billion in a bunker in rural Lebanon in 2010. Much of the money has since disappeared. “I don’t know how the money got to Lebanon,” he said. “If I knew that, we would have made more progress on [accounting for it].”
The leader of the reconstruction effort, U.S. Presidential Envoy L. Paul Bremer, has said, “I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that with the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently. Our top priority was to get the economy moving again. The first step was to get money into the hands of the Iraqi people as quickly as possible. It was not a perfect solution. Delay might well have exacerbated the nascent insurgency and thereby increased the danger to Americans.”
Bremer left Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi Interim Government on June 28, 2004.
The full story of the cash may never be known, but when the U.S. government starts distributing money in the form of crisp new bills loaded on airplanes, one can be sure that the uses for such funds will likely be less than legitimate.
~American Liberty Report
