Iraq Veteran: I Didn't See Iraqi Soldiers Handling Cash as Trump Claimed
Source: NBC News
An Iraq war veteran involved in payments to Iraqi civilians said he saw no evidence of Donald Trump's recent suggestion of Iraqi soldiers "handing out" millions in U.S. cash during military operations there.
"I'm confused by it because, in my experience, Iraqi soldiers never handled U.S. funds when I was deployed over there," former U.S. Army Sgt. Corbin Reiff, who served in Iraq from 2009 to 2010, told NBC News Wednesday.
At a rally in North Carolina Tuesday, Trump called Iraq "crooked as hell." He has sought to use the war in Iraq to question the judgment of Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic opponent in the presidential election.
"How about bringing baskets of money, millions and millions of dollars, and handing it out?" Trump said in Greensboro. "I want to know: who are the soldiers that had that job because I think they're living very well right now, whoever they may be."
Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/iraq-veteran-i-didn-t-see-iraqi-soldiers-handling-cash-n593346
PJMcK
(22,052 posts)tonyt53
(5,737 posts)I used to get emails all the time from supposed US troops in Iraq. The emails stated that they had huge amounts of cash and they needed a place to hide it until they got home. Did Donny get some of those emails too? I bet he did.
Hell, Cheney didn't trust US troops to handle and disperse the cash. He had his own private army of Blackwater mercenaries doling out the cash.
billh58
(6,635 posts)income was Halliburton:
-Snip-
Bowen's findings mark the latest bad news for Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, which is the focus of both a criminal investigation into alleged fuel price gouging and an FBI inquiry into possible favoritism from the Bush administration.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that FBI agents have extensively interviewed an Army contracting officer who last month went public with allegations that the Bush administration was improperly awarding contracts to Halliburton without competitive bidding.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-11-27-halliburton_x.htm
phazed0
(745 posts)Now bear with me.. but I specifically remember this story about $12 Billion dollars dropped into Iraq on Pallets and it all "Vanished"... if that is what he is referring to. The reason the guest on the news program probably didn't see this activity is because it happened in 2004 and was reported on in 2007, before his time. Obviously this would seem to apply to Bush/Cheney more, but it wouldn't surprise me if this activity continued in some form during the Obama administration, either.
The Guardian - How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish
The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.
In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.
Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"
"They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division's vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75m in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds."
The minutes from a May 2004 CPA meeting reveal "a single disbursement of $500m in security funding labelled merely 'TBD', meaning 'to be determined'."
The memorandum concludes: "Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste ... thousands of 'ghost employees' were receiving pay cheques from Iraqi ministries under the CPA's control. Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States."
3catwoman3
(24,054 posts)...for Trump to piss off/alienate.
Nitram
(22,892 posts)Trump is a sleazy lying con-artist, and anyone who doesn't know that by now is just not paying attention.
Nitram
(22,892 posts)...just to see if he can do it. But God help us if he accidentally actually wins the election.
TomCADem
(17,390 posts)Lets see how that works.