Even as I listened to it, while I wanted to believe him, things didn't quite ring true. What follows is from a transcript of DN from October 9, 2007 with my commentary spliced in where I had issues with Greenspan's replies:
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to {…} ask you about, well, a piece by Jim Steele and Don Barlett that came out in Vanity Fair, where they're talking about the billions lost in Iraq. And they begin their piece by saying, "Between April 2003 and June 2004, {$12 billion} in US currency -- much of it belonging to the Iraqi people -- was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed."
Alan Greenspan, when you were head of the Federal Reserve, how much knowledge do you have of this? And did you investigate this? Were you aware of this at the time?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me say that what we were involved in was essentially endeavoring to create a viable currency for the central bank of Iraq.
Wow, so Blackwater wasn't the only private corporation in Iraq. Interesting...
And what we did do was -- I think very successfully -- create what is a viable financial system, even under the circumstances that currently exist.
Yeah, fat lot of good it's doing though, huh? Money doesn't buy everything, I guess. Either that, or your completely incorrect when you say you successfully created a viable financial system. Could go either way.
There was, as far as I can judge, a huge drain of the resources into areas which nobody to this day can understand or follow.
Right, and Condi "White" Rice was right when she said that nobody in government or anywhere else could have imagined AQ would use planes as missiles (even though this was the exact premise of the first episode of the X-Files spin-off series that aired in the spring of 2001). The point is, Al, you're just making excuses here and anyone with a brain can see it.
It had nothing to do with the central bank. In our relationships with them, we were merely acting as an intermediary to assist them in creating a system, which they now have, which is working reasonably well, despite all of the problems that are going on.
Oh, come on, Al! Five seconds ago, you guys set up the Iraqi economy--now it's not you. And you had nothing to do with the money aside from playing middleman. Sounds like more excuses to me.
The issue which you are referring to had nothing to do with the Federal Reserve in any of our relationships with the central bank.
Uhhh... then what was MOST of what you JUST SAID??
AMY GOODMAN: Well, they are talking about, in one day, for example, the East Rutherford operation center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, a tractor-trailer truck pulling up, and though accustomed to receiving and shipping large quantities of cash, the vault had never before processed a single order of this magnitude: $2.4 billion in $100 bills. But ultimately, again, $9 billion of $12 billion gone missing in Iraq.
ALAN GREENSPAN: I am not familiar with any such evidence. And it was certainly not brought to my attention.
Wow, so you're the licensed driver at the wheel when this is happening and you're saying you didn't know what all that cash was doing in the back seat? Come on, man--that was a federal reserve facility at 100 Orchard St., East Rutherford, NJ 07073. By admitting that you are admitting that you were a shitty administrator. But, please, go on:
I, frankly, find it very unlikely that those orders of magnitude were involved in any of the numbers that we were dealing with. You have to make certain that -- there's been a lot of confusion about losses, and people have used the dinar, the basic currency unit of Iraq, and assumed they were American dollars. And, of course, that gives you a highly distorted view.
WOW, so reporters were so stupid as to swap Iraqi Dinars for USD? Those Vanity Fair guys should sue for defamation.
There's been, I've seen, several reports fairly recently in which that sort of mistake was being made. But what I can tell you is that no such numbers of any order of magnitude of the type you are discussing came to the attention of the Federal Reserve.
So, what happened, Al? Someone just back a Ryder truck up to the loading dock at 100 Orchard St., East Rutherford, NJ 07073 and just roll off with $12 billion?
Bloody hell.
Well, the good news here is that Al was lying. Turns out the guys who wrote the VF article were on Tuesday's DN and they had this to say:
DONALD BARLETT:
...One of the problems is that Mr. Greenspan speaks in a language that is unknown to most of us. He's done this for years in a kind of economic doublespeak which goes unchallenged. But in this particular case, Mr. Greenspan is flat wrong. Jim had obtained a lot of this information, which came from Mr. Greenspan's Federal Reserve Bank .
JAMES STEELE: I mean, one of the things that's -- it's hard to decide where almost to begin to talk about this comment of his. He talks about confusion. One of the most significant things that's part of this whole process, the fact that they don't know where this came from, where these numbers came from, all of these came, numbers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is a -- if not a branch, it's certainly part of the Federal Reserve system, which Chairman Greenspan headed for so long. And the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided these to various US government agencies, various congressional committees. There are literally thousands of pages of documents that led to the statistics that we used in our article, which was that basically $12 billion was shipped in this fourteen-month period. And on the one day in particular you mentioned, the $2.4 billion, all of that is out of records of the Federal Reserve system. So the Federal Reserve system certainly was intimately involved in processing this cash from the very beginning.
In a nutshell, these guys got their information for said VF article from the Fed, itself.
Oh and by the way, here's what 100 Orchard St., East Rutherford, NJ 07073 actually looks like according to Google Maps:
Looks pretty much like an industrial park in suburban Jersey to me. Who'd have thunk that it's filled with billions in cash.
Huh.
Orignal From: ALAN GREENSPAN LIES TO DEMOCRACY NOW
No comments:
Post a Comment