| Friday, April 18, 2003 |
01:01 - Unfrozen Funds
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/inside/la-iraq-a041803cash_lat,1,126038
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Oh, this is nice and crunchy.
The Army decided to poke around in some suspicious-looking Baghdad houses that had been barricaded up; and what should they find, but $650 million in cash, in dozens of little metal boxes.
(Thus far.)
Real cash, too; evidently it's been vetted and found to be genuine. That's a lotta money. It'd go a long way toward any of the reconstruction projects we've got planned.
Officials did not immediately confirm that the currency was legal tender, but an Army private here who said he had worked for an armored car company examined the bills and called them genuine.
Taylor Griffin, a U.S. Treasury spokesman, offered assurances that any cash retreived from Hussein's regime would be held aside for the people of Iraq. "If we find money and it's not counterfeit, any assets belonging to Saddam Hussein and his cronies will be returned to the Iraqis," Griffin said.
Soldiers of the division's 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment were ordered to stop searching the area shortly before midnight after commanders discovered $600,000 missing from an opened box. Officers said the cash was recovered in a tree and three soldiers were questioned.
Oh, look-- we're demonstrating our evil colonial intentions by giving it back to the Iraqis. Think how easy it could have been for us to keep it, to declare it as spoils of war, the property of a deposed government-- or even to just hush it up. (And we lay the smack down on our own guys who try to make off with some of the loot. No tontine for you bozos!) Instead, it's going into the trust fund with the oil money.
If, that is, the UN can be persuaded that lifting the sanctions against Iraq is permissible. Which shouldn't be too hard, right? After all, they wanted to lift the sanctions, all up until the start of the war, remember?
Oh yeah. The Americans are in charge now, so the sanctions must stay. I understand.
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