July 19, 2004: White House Withholds Iraq Contract Information, Money Spent Unaccounted For

The head of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, says the Bush administration is withholding information regarding the more than $1 billion in contracts awarded to Halliburton and other companies in Iraq. This information is believed by UN-sanctioned auditors to confirm that these contracts were won without competitive bidding. The White House has rejected requests for this information since March, and will not produce a list of other companies that have obtained such contracts. [The Moscow Times, 7/19/2004] The IAMB, a multi-agency organization in place to oversee the Coalition Provisional Authority’s disbursements from the Development Fund for Iraq, later discovers that over a hundred contracts involving billions of dollars were in need of investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They also discover that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries under CPA control is unaccounted for, while an additional $3.4 billion appropriated by Congress for development eventually became earmarked to fund “security.” The IAMB, once established, was forced to spend months finding auditors acceptable to US authorities. These auditors, appointed in April 2004, are then stonewalled. It is believed that the Bush administration wished to stall until the end of June 2004, at which time the CPA would no longer be extant and Paul Bremer, the pro consul and head of the CPA, would not be answerable to the press. The auditors’ report reveals that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts of the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries. [Guardian, 7/7/2005]