Iraq is now the third most corrupt country in the world

The Bush-Cheney administration has something else for which it can congratulate itself, in addition to the military quagmire it created in Iraq with its "surge." According to the international corruption watchdog group Transparency International, Iraq is now the third most corrupt nation in the world, ranking just ahead of last place Somalia and the military dictatorship of Burma.

It is so bad in Iraq that Iraqi Judge Radhi al-Radhi, who was in charge of anti-corruption efforts in the country as head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, was forced to flee Iraq for the United States last year. Thirty-one of al-Radhi’s investigators were assassinated, a clear indication that it was time for al-Radhi and his family to escape. It is clear that the government of U.S. puppet Nouri al-Maliki, who, along with his top henchman, have squirreled away billions in bank accounts and real estate holdings in Switzerland, London, and Chicago. The Maliki assassins were so brutal that even the bodies of 12 family members of al-Radhi’s investigators were found with drill holes in their bodies, evidence that they were tortured before they were murdered.

Saddam Hussein’s government never approached the level of corruption in Iraq now being advanced and nurtured by the puppet Maliki regime. In bed with U.S. contractors like Halliburton, Blackwater, and other firms that have raked in obscene profits from the neocon-inspired and directed war, the Maliki regime has turned over Iraq’s oil production to foreign oil companies, failed to properly account for its own oil revenues, ignored even the most basic accounting procedures, and now plans to play a diversion game by suing businessmen and government officials in the West it accuses of profiting from the Saddam Hussein era’s United Nations "Oil-for-Food" program.

Meanwhile, the State Department, which contracted with al-Radhi to oversee anti-corruption efforts in Iraq, now wants nothing to do with him. Almost broke and living in a suburb of Washington, DC, al-Radhi has been the subject of a neocon character assassination campaign. Even though al-Radhi has testified before Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Democrats did nothing as al-Radhi’s son reportedly had his U.S. residency visa pulled by the State Department and was forced to return to Iraq where he now faces a fate similar to al-Radhi’s investigators and their families if Judge al-Radhi does not cease his criticism of Maliki and his corrupt cronies. Online Journal