Private Security paid in a gunny sack from Saddam's basement

Senate Democrats are investigating one of the greatest crimes in American history: the outright theft of uncounted billions of tax dollars perpetrated by GOP-connected corporations with the assistance of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says.

Because the country lacked a functioning banking system, contractors and Iraqi ministry officials were paid with bills taken from a basement vault in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces that served as headquarters for the Coalition Provisional Authority, former CPA official Frank Willis said.

Officials from the CPA, which ruled Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, would count the money when it left the vault, but nobody kept track of the cash after that...

Calling it looting by mercenaries sounds so coarse, doesn't it?

But do read all Athenae has to say, it only gets more interesting.