Neil Abercrombie: “Members may be familiar with the program Marketplace. It is on the radio and follows the National Public Radio news, All…”

“Members may be familiar with the program Marketplace. It is on the radio and follows the National Public Radio news, All Things Considered, the afternoon edition of it. There is a business broadcast called Marketplace which reviews the market decisions, the business activities of the country, and in their series entitled The Spoils of War, Members will find that the money which otherwise might have been spent, according to the contract that your company represents, to provide armor for the Humvees is now going out at the rate of tens of millions of dollars a week, perhaps a month, in graft and corruption through the Bank of Iraq, with nothing in the way of any kind of accountability under the Provisional Authority, Mr. Bremer's Provisional Authority. This is being done today. They are done with DGs, or director generals, of the various Iraqi ministries. They are the equivalent of under secretaries. They go into the bank and walk out with cardboard boxes full of cash. Corruption is in the hands of clerks who simply rubber-stamp the action, and the American companies that are over there taking the money are paying bribes, are involved in mass corruption, and this is where the money is going. This is what the Provisional Authority is involved in. This is what is happening.”