Playing Monopoly with Iraqi money

Loretta Napoleoni & Georgia Straight, ZNet

The biggest transfer of cash in history took place from May 2003 to June 2004 when the U.S. Federal Reserve of New York shipped $12 billion in bills of various denominations to war-torn Iraq. Over the course of one year, a fleet of C-130s carried, from New York to Baghdad, 484 pallets weighing a total of 363 tonnes and holding 281 million banknotes. This is not an advertisement for a new board game but the summary of a memorandum prepared for a meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, which is examining the "reconstruction" of Iraq under Paul Bremer. No proper record of the funds, which were distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is available...

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