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post-Saddam era, allegations of massive corruption and money laundering have plagued the Iraqi Central Bank, one of the most frequent destinations of the money from the cash flights. Ged Smith, despite his disgust in 2003, got involved in Iraq policy again in 2007 when he went to Baghdad as the Treasury attaché at the U.S. embassy.
    In early 2008, fire struck the central bank, the building that had been looted and flooded in the days after the 2003 invasion. Smith rushed down to the bank and quickly realized that it was an inside job. The worst damage from the fire was to the bank’s computers and financial records. Although the computer system was fried, the bank was still able to function the next day. The bank’s security guard force was present when the fire occurred, but the bank’s video cameras did not show who set the blaze. Many of the bank’s records, dating back to the postinvasion period under the CPA, were lost. The fire was part of a cover-up of massive thievery and money laundering, Smith concluded.
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    In October 2012, Dr. Sinan al-Shabibi, the governor of the Iraqi Central Bank, went to Tokyo to attend the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. On his way back to Baghdad, during a layover in Frankfurt, al-Shabibi called a colleague to see if he had missed anything important in Iraq while he was away. He was quickly told that Prime Minister Maliki was planning to have him arrested when he landed in Baghdad. So al-Shabibi caught a flight to Geneva instead, and has been in exile in Switzerland ever since. Maliki’s government issued an arrest warrant for al-Shabibi as part of a wider investigation of corruption and money laundering at the central bank. In a series of interviews from exile in Geneva, al-Shabibi denies the Maliki government’s allegations of corruption against him, and instead says that Maliki moved against him because Maliki wanted to consolidate his own control over the central bank and its massive foreign currency reserves.
    Al-Shabibi also said that while he knows that questions have been raised about the missing money from the cash flights from the United States, he does not know whether it was all properly accounted for or not. “There were questions raised by Iraqis [about how the Americans had handled the money], and the answer from the Americans was always an answer that this money has been spent for the benefit of the Iraqi people,” al-Shabibi said. But he added that management of the central bank was weak in the first year or so following the U.S. invasion. “The central bank was not very well organized in the beginning,” he noted. “The early period was a very difficult period.”
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    Stuart Bowen, a lawyer with a patrician ancestry and deep roots in George W. Bush’s Texas circles, came to Washington with the bona fides of a true loyalist. He had worked for Bush when Bush was Texas governor, had gone to Florida to help the Bush campaign in the legal fight during the 2000 recount, and then joined Bush’s White House staff as associate counsel. He later served as deputy staff secretary in the White House, a position that placed him in the inner ring of trust. And so Bowen seemed to be a safe choice when the White House needed someone who could be counted on to pull his punches and protect the president from the political fallout from the war in Iraq.
    Once the war started going badly, and the White House had to continually go back to Congress for more and more money to fund it, frustrated congressional leaders finally demanded that a watchdog post be created to keep track of the tens of billions of dollars they were sending, blindly, to Iraq. The Bush administration reluctantly agreed to the creation of a special inspector general (IG) who would have wide-ranging investigative powers to scrutinize what was happening in the war zone.
    But the last thing the administration really wanted was an