Bush Administration Lied on Iraqi Reconstruction Spending

The GAOhas the details on Iraqi reconstruction spending, but the nickel tour is that Bush and His Evil Minions^™ lied when they said that, "By July 2007, the administration said, Iraq had spent some 24 percent of $10 billion set aside for reconstruction that year", as was stated in documents given by Crocker and Petraeus to Congress.

But in its report on Tuesday, the accountability office said official Iraqi Finance Ministry records showed that Iraq had spent only 4.4 percent of the reconstruction budget by August 2007. It also said that the rate of spending had substantially slowed from the previous year.

The reason for the difference, said Joseph A. Christoff, the G.A.O.’s director of international affairs and trade, was that few official Iraqi figures for 2007 were available when General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker went to Congress.

So the administration, with the help of the Finance Ministry in Baghdad, appears to have relied on a combination of indicators, including real expenditures, ministries’ suggestions of projects they intended to carry out, and contracts that were still under negotiation, Mr. Christoff said. But actual spending does not seem to have lived up to those estimates for spending on reconstruction, a budget item sometimes called capital or investment expenditures, he added.

“So it looked like an improvement, but it wasn’t an improvement,” he said.

Meaning that there was no data, and that they did not look for ways to get that data, because they were under orders to sell Bush's endless war^™.

This was not bad data, this was Crocker and Petraeus telling the Iraqis the numbers they wanted, and then getting those numbers.

BTW, the 2007 number on Iraqi spending is LESS than the 2006 number. It's getting worse, not better.