Yes, Virginia, such things do exist!
Apparently at the "hand-over" (and I use that term very loosely) of sovereignty to Iraq, the Federal Reserve shipped over 363 TONS of hard cash to Iraq's leaders. Some 8.8 billion (that's billion with a "B") has been handed to Iraqi ministries and is unaccounted for (as of 2005).
I suppose this could be called the largest bribe in history but I would imagine that the gifting of Eastern Europe to Stalin will probably be viewed as bigger.
Of course, who knows what happened to those planeloads? We certainly don't. Neither do we care, it seems.
Posted by artandscience at February 7, 2007 06:19 AM