Huh?
IG: Afghan fuel records go missing
Aaron Mehta
Center for Public Integrity, 11 September 2012
What happened to almost $475 million worth of oil destined for the Afghan National Army – that’s what the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) would like to know.
Unfortunately, the inspectors may never find out. According to the report released Monday, more than four years of financial records that the Department of Defense was supposed to keep to track this spending are either missing or so poorly kept that even gathering basic information, such as the location and size of fuel sites, was not possible.
The report concludes that the Department of Defense agency in charge of tracking the oil “does not have accurate or supportable information on how much U.S. funds are needed for [Army] fuel, where and how the fuel is actually used, or how much fuel has been lost or stolen.”
Inspectors found that records from October 2006 to March 2011 were shredded improperly, a violation of DOD policies that made it impossible for auditors to track what happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of oil. DOD also “could not provide more than half” of the documents requested from March 2011 onward.
Phi Beta Iota: On 10 September, the day before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was being grilled by Cynthia McKinney and other Members of Congress on 2.3 TRILLION in unaccounted for DoD funds. On 9/11, whatever kit the Pentagon allegedly destroyed the computers holding the forensic accounting. INTEGRITY is a holistic concept. What we buy, how we buy it, how much we spend on people versus hardware, how much we spent on loyal uniformed forces versus mercenary contractors, how much we spend on coalition partners known to be deeply corrupt from the President on down–all of this challenges our integrity. Fuel records are not normally shredded. This reeks of a cover-up; $475 million is a serious amount of money. The Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) merits public applause for singling this specific corruption of process and finance.
