Well Laz, seeing that the election is over and nothing can be done about it, what's the point? Yeah, Bush is still a moron but he won the election. When he screws the pooch I will let you know it.
Untill something more important comes along, I posted
THIS for you to defend his high holiness' actions. You may not have to wait long,
NBC has uncovered mismanagement and incompetence in the handling of Iraq's oil money by Bush's administration.
In a series of reports on U.S. management of the oil money, auditors working for the United Nation's Iraq Advisory and Monitoring Board and the Inspector General of the Coalition Provisional Authority found:
*Insufficient controls
*Missing records
*Two sets of books at Iraq's Finance Ministry, which did not match
In one example of insufficient controls, the United States stored hundreds of millions of oil dollars in a vault in a Baghdad palace. Government auditors found that the key to the vault was kept “unsecured” — in a U.S. official’s backpack.
Iraq’s U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer, pledged last year to hire a certified public accounting firm to ensure proper controls. But the United States gave the contract not to an accounting firm but to a tiny consulting company, Northstar — which NBC News found is headquartered at a private home near San Diego.
"They violated the rules. They picked a contractor who didn’t meet their requirements," says Paul Light, a government contracting expert and professor at New York University.
Northstar’s president says the Pentagon knew Northstar was not a certified public accounting firm and that four experienced employees went to Iraq and did a good job. However, one audit notes that a single Northstar employee maintained spreadsheets tracking billions of dollars.
Bremer would not comment. His aides say Iraq is a war zone and their top priority was getting money quickly where it was needed, even if the accounting wasn't perfect.
But NBC News has learned that a draft government audit faults the United States for “inadequate stewardship” of up to $8.8 billion in oil money, handed over to Iraq’s ministries but never fully accounted for.
I mean really, who cares if we waste/lose/steal Iraq's oil money. We can just get Congress to make up the difference with US tax money.
