Iraq’s Mystery Money
There’s been a lot of coverage in past months of the “unaccounted for” millions of dollars (in cash) delivered by the U.S. into post-invasion Iraq. Pallets and pallets of cash, in fact; so much money we only know how much it weighed, not how much it was worth. Much speculation has gone on about where the money went, and why. Looking for information last night about the infrequently-wondered question “Where’d the money come from?”, I came up with an interesting, and unprovable, theory I haven’t seen suggested elsewhere.
It seems hard to believe that we’d be distributing literally tonnes of cash, yet not keeping careful records of how much it’s actually worth, or where it went. There’s a fairly simple explanation, though, that’s believable, and beautiful, despite it’s conspiratorial nature. Quite simply, I propose that the cavalier attitudes and lax record-keeping about this mystery money is because it officially didn’t exist.
Where could you get cash that no longer exists on the books? Well, suppose you had huge quantities of federal reserve notes that were still legal tender, but that had been withdrawn from circulation, because they’d been replaced by new bills with harder-to-counterfeit designs. Sound familiar?
Instead of being shredded and incinerated, suppose you diverted a quantity of these bills into storage somewhere; voila, “free” funds for any activities or transactions you’d like to keep off the books. Sure, it would obviously be a very corrupt, dishonest, sleazy, and brilliantly underhanded thing to do. You were saying?
Now, I have no proof that this happened, but the withdrawal of huge quantities of “old” currency from circulation would seem to create a great “black” source of cash that you not only wouldn’t need to carefully and painstakingly account for, but wouldn’t want to. Given that kind of opportunity, and the temptations involved, it’s not hard to believe.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.