{"id":199632,"date":"2015-11-12T16:14:50","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T16:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=199632"},"modified":"2015-11-12T16:16:08","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T16:16:08","slug":"american-war-in-the-twenty-first-century-a-scam-a-swindle-and-a-fraud-truthdig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/american-war-in-the-twenty-first-century-a-scam-a-swindle-and-a-fraud-truthdig\/","title":{"rendered":"American War in the Twenty-First Century: A Scam, a Swindle and a Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let\u2019s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/10\/12\/world\/investigation-into-missing-iraqi-cash-ended-in-lebanon-bunker.html\" target=\"_blank\">$1.2 to $1.6 billion<\/a> of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that\u2019s just what happened as the starting gun went off.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2011\/08\/30\/military-spending-waste_n_942723.html\" target=\"_blank\">estimated<\/a> that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American \u201creconstruction\u201d of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed \u201cas crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country\u2019s security.\u201d It was, however, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2006\/09\/27\/AR2006092702134.html\" target=\"_blank\">so poorly constructed<\/a> that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, \u201cfeces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks\u201d and that was only the beginning of its problems.<\/p>\n<p>When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a<em>New York Times<\/em> reporter <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/06\/world\/middleeast\/06police.html\" target=\"_blank\">visited<\/a> and found that \u201cthe ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.\u201d This seems to have been<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/01\/29\/world\/middleeast\/29reconstruction.html\" target=\"_blank\">par<\/a> for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/empty-iraq-prison-a-monument-to-waste\/\" target=\"_blank\">$40 million prison<\/a> Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.truthdig.com\/report\/item\/american_war_in_the_twenty-first_century_a_scam_a_swindle_20151112\">Read more<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let\u2019s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":199633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-199632","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}