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| Iraq-Jordan |
| SAS given 100,000 lbs. to bribe Iraqis |
| 2005-08-28 |
| BRITISH Army officers in Iraq are being handed stashes of up to £100,000 in cash for âoperational expensesâ without formal controls on how it is spent. The money is used by the SAS and other units to buy off leaders of the insurgency or to purchase weapons on the black market to avoid them passing into rebel hands. The decades-old tradition of paying so-called âporter moneyâ to officers is understood to be the focus of a wide-ranging internal inquiry in the SAS. It follows allegations earlier this year that hundreds of thousands of pounds may have been misappropriated during SAS covert operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The Sunday Times has obtained a photograph of a British officer smiling broadly as he holds nearly £60,000 worth of Iraqi dinars â still less than the maximum allowance. The cash, in crisp new notes, is neatly stacked in bundles that he holds to his chest. The officer, said to be a captain in the SAS, told friends that the money â 158m Iraqi dinars â was part of a secret stash kept at the barracks at Basra Palace in southern Iraq. He claimed it was used to bribe locals suspected of collaborating with rebels loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, and to buy weapons on the black market. âItâs held in a drawer in a room at the back of the palace. The SAS just walk in and take it out in a bag,â an insider said. The picture was taken in March this year and was circulated by the officer â whose name The Sunday Times is withholding for security reasons â in e-mails to his friends and family. There is no suggestion that he has acted improperly with the money. Ken Connor, a former SAS soldier who is now a military historian, said âporter moneyâ was first used by the SAS when it was fighting rebels in the jungles of Malaya and Borneo in the 1950s. Connor said: âIt was used to pay locals who were employed as porters to help carry the regimentâs heavy equipment through the jungle. âThe accountability is very loose. Itâs got to be because being in the SAS is not like being in a normal nine to five job. But Iâve never heard of such large amounts being available. If thereâs a job where you can get £100,000 without having to account for it, please count me in.â Connor said the regimentâs use of âporter moneyâ had sparked a previous investigation. âThere was a big scandal during the Dhofar campaign,â he said, referring to SAS operations in Oman during the early 1970s. The Ministry of Defence said that it was the departmentâs policy not to discuss special forces matters. The ease with which SAS officers have been given access to such large sums of cash has raised eyebrows among colleagues in other units. The alleged irregularities came to light after concerns were raised about the purchase of aviation fuel and other supplies for a secret mission. Sources said military investigators queried some of the invoices. There are suggestions that they may have been inflated and the extra cash channelled elsewhere. A senior officer with extensive special forces experience flew to Iraq this month to take part in an inquiry into the affair. The SAS has always been able to secure funds for its special operations without going through the bureaucratic processes to which other regiments are subject. Other units in Iraq have also occasionally been granted âporter moneyâ in special circumstances. A review of the whole system of âporter moneyâ is now likely. A friend of one SAS officer said: âHe told me they were getting into trouble about the money, that other soldiers were asking questions about why they had so much money. He said they were probably going to have to find a better way of doing it.â A source said inquiries were looking into covert accounts used by the elite regiment to finance operations against Al-Qaeda terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. âInvestigators are going through the SAS accounts,â said the source. âThey are investigating every penny thatâs gone through the SAS in recent years.â |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #11 Yea but Anonymoose just think of all the UK National Health Service appointments and operations that could have been resheduled to a later date in hopes the ill would drop dead or go away with that money. Just think how far that money might have gone at home in the UK. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet O´ Doom 2005-08-28 22:35 |
| #10 At the current rate of exchange, that is the whopping huge sum of $180,000 USD. Peanuts. Nothing. The US military has confiscated and spent tens of millions of Saddam's dollars for similar purposes. And yes, the US bureaucrats freaked out about military people spending money that the bureaucrats hadn't parceled out to them. The bottom line: it not only works, but it is one of the best ideas for reconstruction ever. The money didn't take critical months to get bureaucratic approval, arrive, and be carefully accounted for in dispersal. Each command used it for immediate, pragmatic, and well-thought out purposes and accomplished miraculous improvements both in the combat situation and reconstruction effort. In future, the Pentagon should create a black budget amounting to tens of billions of dollars to be dispersed to field commanders at their discretion and with minimal accountability. These monies should be distributed as soon as major hostilities cease, in cash and appropriate other mediums to include gold, neutral nation currencies, and paper money that has been marked for future identification. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-08-28 11:40 |
| #9 Add this site to your bookmarks: Index DOT html. Or for a more compact and focused list, try this Latin-1 list. |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2005-08-28 11:06 |
| #8 ⢠= alt-0153 |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-08-28 10:56 |
| #7 Any chance of stashing this in the classics so I can find it? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-08-28 10:42 |
| #6 Instead of learning all these neat geek tricks, Currency traders long ago assigned unpronounceable TLAs to currencies so you can just type three little letters: $=USD £=GBP (that & pound thing works!) &euro=EUR (so does & Euro) |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-08-28 10:15 |
| #5 Or you can let HTML do the work for you. These will supposedly work in any browser using any character set. ¢ - ¢ £ - £ ¥ - ¥ © - © ® - ® ° - ° ± - ± ¼ - ¼ ½ - ½ ¾ - ¾ ö - ö < - < > - > |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-08-28 10:03 |
| #4 LBS OK, try Pounds Sterling. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet O´ Doom 2005-08-28 04:37 |
| #3 True. So you can offer them their common list. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-08-28 04:30 |
| #2 In ISO-8859-1 encoding, of course. Our European friends who use ISO-8859-15 will see some different characters. |
| Posted by: gromky 2005-08-28 03:35 |
| #1 Off-Topic Note: 1) Num Lock ON 2) hold down Alt key and, on the number pad, type 0163: £ Common chars -------------------------- © - 0169 (copyright) ® - 0174 (reg'd trademark) ¢ - 0162 (cents) £ - 0163 (UK Pound) ¥ - 0165 (Japanese Yen) « - 0171 (left chevrons) » - 0187 (right chevrons) ¼ - 0188 (1/4) ½ - 0189 (1/2) ¾ - 0190 (3/4) ö - 0246 (Shröder) ° - 0176 (degree) ± - 0177 (plus or minus) ² - 0178 (power of 2) ³ - 0179 (power of 3 - cubed) Sorry for the interruption. As you were. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-08-28 02:55 |