How to Launder Foreign Aid

American Thinker.com ^ | November 21, 2019 | Mark A. Hewitt

[Kaslin]

In early 2008, the company for which I was working won a small contract to manage the airport in Monrovia, Liberia. Before the Liberian civil war, Roberts Field had a storied history. Along with being Pan American Airlines’ main African station for many decades, aircraft from the U.S. Army Air Corps harassed and attacked the southern flank of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The PanAm station chief ran the remote 5,000-acre airport and a Motel 6-like facility on the Farmington River, adjacent to the Firestone Plantation. For their transient aircrew, Pan Am had a two-story hotel on the beach with a bar and grille where fresh lobster, fish, and shrimp were caught daily. PanAm’s Boeing 707s and 747s stopped for fuel, food prepared by French chefs, or engine changes before traveling to South Africa or the Middle East. Roberts Field had the longest runway in Africa and served as a Space Shuttle emergency landing strip.

Fifteen years of civil war destroyed Monrovia’s infrastructure and Roberts Field. In 2008 Monrovia was the only capital city in the world without electricity. Roberts Field received some electricity from the small hydroelectric plant on the Firestone Plantation. All the former government buildings in and around Monrovia were shells, as destitute Liberians had stripped bombed buildings for whatever they could use or sell to scrapyards. The two-story airport terminal structure had been bombed and gutted down to the concrete floors and columns during the war. The Liberian Customs office at the airport was a two-car garage-sized structure with a single 25-watt lightbulb barely illuminating the area. There were three desks, two with signs that read: No bribes taken at this desk. There was a single customs official present but she wasn’t sitting at a desk with a sign.

[texas booster]

This article is worth breaking FR rules and clicking to read the entire article. And while you are there, click on a few advertising links.

While reading remember that this happened in 2008 under sHrillary!

...I was visiting the U.S. Embassy when the Econ Chief said something that virtually knocked me over. He said we were very good stewards of American taxpayer money and that their vendor wasn’t the best solution for all USAID cases. USAID monies do go directly to the foreign governments but are managed through his office. But because of what we were doing and how we were going about it, he could bypass the U.S. State Department’s goods and services vendor and drop USAID funds directly into the airport’s operational account for the things we needed at the airport.

While my airport manager was ecstatic, I was dumbfounded. The Econ Chief, obviously unwittingly, was articulating how freely U.S. foreign aid can be handled by U.S. Embassies. In our case, once those funds were in the airport’s operational account, they could be used for other things unrelated to airport operations...

[Pining_4_TX]

Very well written and funny book.... Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia by Theodore Dalyrimple.

[palmer]

I found out a bit about the USAID oversight process during Obama. They hired corrupt companies filled with morons who had no idea where the money really ends up. The other thing I noticed was that the companies were hotbeds of Islamism.