Our Fucking Money

thats $10 BILLION of our fucking money. this country's wealth is being stolen by our leaders, while everyone remains silent and flips the channels. this shit pisses me off, i can think of quite a few good causes to spend $10 billion on in this country. our country is being royally fucked under the guise of the "War on Terror".


Pakistan's $4.2 Billion "Blank Check" for US Military Aid
By Nathaniel Heller, Sarah Fort and Marina Walker Guevara
The Center for Public Integrity

Tuesday 27 March 2007

After 9/11, funding to country soars with little oversight.

Washington - In the three years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. military aid to Pakistan soared to $4.2 billion, compared to $9.1 million in the three years before the attacks - a 45,000 percent increase - boosting Pakistan to the top tier of countries receiving this type of funding.

More than half of the new money was provided through a post-9/11 Defense Department program - Coalition Support Funds - not closely tracked by Congress.

This is a key finding of an investigative study by the Center for Public Integrity, using data assembled through Freedom of Information Act requests. Pakistan received $2.3 billion of post-9/11 aid from CSF money in fiscal years 2002 through 2004, a total that surpassed $3 billion in 2005. Not only did this earn it the No. 1 rank among nations receiving CSF money, but Pakistan's take was nearly four times as much as all other countries combined received by 2005.

"With the possible exception of Iraq reconstruction funds, I've never seen a larger blank check for any country than for the Pakistan CSF program," Tim Rieser, the majority clerk on the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, told the Center.

CSF money has continued to flow despite growing U.S. concerns over Pakistan's assistance in the global war on terror, and the Congressional Research Service estimates Pakistan's total take of CSF through August 2006 at $4.75 billion.

The administration has requested an additional $1 billion in CSF funding for coalition partners as part of the Defense Department's 2007 emergency budget supplemental request. Congress is currently debating the proposal.

CSF's official purpose is to reimburse allied countries for costs incurred in supporting the U.S. global war on terror. The Center's analysis of CSF and other military aid programs since 9/11 will be detailed in an upcoming investigative series, "Collateral Damage."

Pakistan's flood of CSF money made it the third largest recipient of all U.S. military aid and assistance in the three years after 9/11; it trailed only Israel and Egypt. Before 9/11, the South Asian nation received less military aid and assistance from the U.S. than Estonia or Panama, largely because of U.S. sanctions imposed as punishment for Pakistan's covert pursuit of a nuclear weapons program revealed in 1998.

A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates the total value of all American aid, including military, economic, and development assistance, to Pakistan since 9/11 at more than $10 billion.

In return for American largesse, Pakistan has become a key U.S. ally in its global war on terror. Since 2001, the country has allowed the U.S. to use air bases in anti-terrorism operations, provided access to logistics facilities in Pakistan, shared intelligence, helped identify and detain citizens who may have been involved in terrorism, and tightened the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan by deploying up to 80,000 Pakistani troops.

But the border remains porous, and Vice President Dick Cheney recently met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to complain that Pakistan was not doing enough to halt the flow of insurgents. In January this year, the House of Representatives set out to place conditions on continued U.S. support to Pakistan, calling for greater oversight on Pakistan's actions against insurgents based in Pakistan and progress on holding free elections. The White House opposes the House restrictions.

Musharraf has been under increasing political pressure at home following his firing of Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry on March 9, a move widely viewed as a crack down on the Pakistani judiciary. Since the dismissal, protests have erupted across the country, although most have been peaceful.

CSF was created in the series of emergency supplemental appropriations bills passed by Congress after the 2001 attacks. Beginning in early 2002, Congress began giving the Defense Department hundreds of millions of dollars a year to reimburse coalition governments for their support in the war on terror and, later, Iraq.

When Center reporters called the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2006 seeking copies of the Pentagon CSF reports, they were told that the reports were not public information. Committee staff told the reporters they would need to ask the Pentagon for the information; the reporters did, through a Freedom of Information Act request, and getting the information took several months.

"Coalition Support Funds" is not an official term but a colloquialism used within the Defense Department. The language used in legislation has been "payments to reimburse Pakistan, Jordan, and other key cooperating nations, for logistical, military, and other support provided, or to be provided, to United States military operations, notwithstanding any other provision of law."

The legislation appropriating the billions of CSF dollars to Pakistan and other key allies requires reports from the Department of Defense to both the appropriations and armed services committees of the House and Senate describing how the money was spent.

In a written response to the Center's questions about how the U.S. government vets Pakistan's CSF bills, the Department of Defense public affairs office responded: "Each claim for reimbursement from Coalition Support Funds is evaluated to ensure the country expended its resources, the support was essential to U.S. military operations, and that the claim is reasonable and credible with documentation that adequately accounts for the support provided."

But most of the Pentagon's reports to Congress lack detailed descriptions of costs incurred. For example, for the three-month period from April to June 2003, U.S. taxpayers reimbursed Pakistan $192.7 million. The Pentagon's report said nothing more than, "This payment is based on the bills submitted from the Government of Pakistan (GOP) for the support it provided to U.S. military operations during April through June related to the global war on terrorism (GWOT)."

Later that same year, the Defense Department approved another $195 million payment to Pakistan and its report suggested that little or no actual costs were known: "This estimate is based on anticipated support that will be provided by Pakistan, and reflects the historical average monthly rate of $65 million."

There is no formal auditing mechanism to verify costs apart from local U.S. embassies and military officials vouching for the accuracy of the submitted bills, and Rieser, the Senate Appropriations Committee aide, told the Center that the former Republican congress "did next to nothing to track what was done with the money."

"CSF," said Rieser, a key advisor to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., "is a backwater of lax oversight and poor accountability." Republican Senate Appropriations Committee staff did not return repeated calls requesting comment.

U.S. lawmakers aren't the only legislators in the dark when it comes to CSF payments to Pakistan. When contacted by the Center, an exiled Pakistani senator, Sana Baloch, said that the Pakistani Ministry of Defense refused to provide Pakistani lawmakers with details of post-9/11 U.S. support to Pakistan.

CSF differs from traditional U.S. military assistance in that it is designed only to reimburse "costs" and is not designed to serve as a grant in the way ordinary U.S. military training and financing programs like the International Military Education and Training program or the Foreign Military Financing program function.

Under CSF, foreign governments generate "bills" for costs incurred in counterterrorism operations and then submit the bills - often for such items as fuel, ammunition, security, and airlift - to the American embassy in their country. The embassy reviews the bills and forwards them to the senior U.S. military officer in the region, who vets them to determine whether they are legitimate and not inflated. Once approved, they go to the Pentagon and the State Department, which must both approve a payment.

Christine Fair, co-author of a recent report on the human rights performance of internal security forces in South Asia for the think tank RAND, and a South Asia expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said there is a political dimension to CSF that needs greater scrutiny. Pakistan, she said, "is grossly overcompensated."

Craig Cohen, one of the authors of the CSIS report on post-9/11 aid to Pakistan, described CSF as "more of a way to reward the government for its cooperation." When Senator Jack Reed, D-R.I., returned from an October 2006 trip to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, he noted in a report to fellow lawmakers that officials at the American embassy in Pakistan recommended changing the program "to paying for specific objectives that are planned and executed, rather than simply paying what the country bills."

Senator Enver Baig, a member of Pakistan's parliament, told HDNet's Dan Rather Reports, which collaborated with the Center on this story, that, "[The] people of Pakistan are unaware as to what kind of cooperation the Pakistani Defense Forces are giving to the United States in the war on terror. Because we feel unless and until the people of Pakistan are involved, until and unless the cooperation by the people of Pakistan is there, I don't think Mr. Musharraf can single handedly make any progress as far as the war on terror is concerned."

http://www.publicintegrity.org/icij/default.aspx#1