Sooner or later, one of these will gain traction

Yet another scandal is swirling around the Shrub gang. Again, just like the ones before, the ovine US media seems uninterested. Even so, there are a few bubbles rising and who knows, maybe this will be the one that will actually rouse them from their coma.

Back on October 6, CNN reported that

[w]hat began as a congressional hearing on a U.N. oil-for-food program during Saddam Hussein's regime has become an effort to investigate whether the Bush administration properly handled a postwar program involving $20 billion in Iraqi funds.

A House panel plans to send a subpoena Wednesday to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, seeking documentation of the money flow through the Development Fund for Iraq, managed by the postwar Coalition Provisional Authority led by Bush appointee L. Paul Bremer.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), ranking minority member of the Committee on Government Reform, raised the issue at the opening of a hearing by the Subcommittee of National Security about Saddam Hussein's evasion of the so-called oil-for-food program.

Waxman said he supported that probe but added that "our first priority should be to investigate our own conduct," referring to the Development Fund for Iraq.

He then expressed concern that "the Bush administration failed to properly account for Iraqi funds" coming through the program, according to independent auditors and the CPA's inspector general.

Waxman's office Wednesday said nearly $9 billion was unaccounted for as the Iraqi interim government came into office.

Last Thursday, Waxman followed that up with this:

A new audit by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board finds that the Bush Administration has not properly accounted for the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi oil proceeds.

(A fact sheet on the audit, listing $3.2 billion in questionable or undocumented expenses, is here in .pdf format; the entire audit, also a .pdf file, is here.)

The subpoena will have no immediate impact, however: Committee Chair Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) had said first a letter will be sent to Donald Rumsfeld asking for the information; if there is no answer by the deadline, the subpoena will go out. The deadline, conveniently enough, is November 5.

But things could heat up: On Monday Aljazeerah said that a newspaper in Bahrain, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, claims that a report by Iraq's Directorate of Financial Supervision will charge that during his administration of Iraq, Paul Bremer and his aides embezzled $8.8 billion by paying government salaries to people who don't exist.

I have no idea how reliable Akhbar Al-Khaleej is; for all I know it's Bahrain's equivalent of the National Enquirer or, worse, the New York Post. But if the accusation is true for even a fraction of that amount, it would appear to be something even our media could not ignore.

If you want a link to the original article, there's a .pdf version here - but I'm afraid it did me no good: It's in Arabic.

Footnote: Just for a little perspective: Saddam has been accused of manipulating the program to gain $11 billion over the not-quite seven years of the oil-for-food program. Bremer is accused of failing to account for a minimum of $3.2 billion over about 8 months - and the one source has him siphoning off $8.8 billion in that time. Saddam was a piker.