I’m delighted that Andrew Natsios has joined the rats eagerly swimming away from the foundering Bush Administration. But why should it have taken Natsios’s complaints about the Coalition Provisional Authority to bring mass-media attention to the massive corruption that has paralyzed the reconstruction of Iraq?
If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq will not become the shining beacon of democracy envisioned by the Bush administration, it will become the biggest corruption scandal in history.
(Emphasis added.)
And yet a Google search for ["transparency international" iraq corruption scandal] yields stories (before yesterday) only from the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, and al-Jazeera. No major U.S. media outlet thought the warning worth mentioning. [Not so: see correction below.]
Add “biggest corruption scandal in history, according to Transparency International,” and “free-fraud zone” to your list of stock phrases to use this year and in 2008.
Correction: A reader whose search skills exceed mine uses Factiva and finds contemperaneous stories on the report in Newsweek and USA Today. A story also ran on AP.