> Everyone is surprised to find the government does shady stuff, but many of these operations are even acknowledged like Iran-Contra where the government sold arms to the embargoed Khomeini government to generate black money to fund the Contras.

Another one, maybe the biggest known one, is when the US sent 12 bn to 14 bn in the form of 100 bills (yup, in bills) using a military plane to Iraq and these bills mostly all mysteriously vanished.

12 to 14... billions.

At least 1.4 bn was found to have been stolen and stored in a bunker in... Lebanon (I don't remember if it was just located or seized). Overall an estimated 9 bn are unaccounted for I think.

(trying to insert the wikipedia and NY Times link to the story/stories but I get a "we have trouble processing your request, sorry" from HN)

There were wire transfer to the tune of billions too. But the 100 bills shrink-wrapped and flew in a military plane: you cannot make that up.

Shady stuff if any...

EDIT: like Iran-Contra, I'm pretty sure in the future movies are going to be made about these $100 bills.

> (trying to insert the wikipedia and NY Times link to the story/stories but I get a "we have trouble processing your request, sorry" from HN)

Try base64 encoding them and pasting the results?

To think that this money didn't end up financing insurgency is to be naive.

In fairness, it's likely that not much of that money went to financing insurgency. Some? Yes. Most? No way.

Way too many piglets. Way too few tits.

> However, evidence before the committee suggests that senior American officials were unconcerned about the situation because the billions were not US taxpayers' money. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, reminded the committee that "the subject of today's hearing is the CPA's use and accounting for funds belonging to the Iraqi people held in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq. These are not appropriated American funds. They are Iraqi funds. I believe the CPA discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people."

You left out something pretty damn important, it was Iraqi money to begin with. Maybe they requested large pallets of cash, it shouldn’t matter since it’s their (Iraq’s) money!

I don’t doubt the government has had a hand in shady stuff (US history from 1946-now in particular proves this), but this isn’t what it seems. We didn’t just break off $12B of US treasury money and send it off to Iraq with no oversight.

> EDIT: like Iran-Contra, I'm pretty sure in the future movies are going to be made about these $100 bills.

I highly doubt it, unless it is what Iraq did with its own money after they received it from the Fed, what would the movie be about even? Iraq requests it’s money and receives it is a pretty boring plot

It was Iraqi money, but the people spending it were Americans or American controlled. At the point Iraq was under direct occupation control. The fact we saw it as play money because we seized it from the Iraqi government "on behalf of the Iraqi people" and then splashed it around for fun is disgusting.

Please don't bring us into this. The American State is not representative of its subjects.

> Please don't bring us into this. The American State is not representative of its subjects.

It is representive because it is a democracy. This sort of thinking you described is what leads to people skirting on their responsibilities.

This comment begs for some sources and citations.

Edit: I have a recollection of this incident but certainly not as mysteriously inexplicable and shady as you make it out. There was some context I've forgotten. Your story rings false.

googling "US plane 100 dollar bills iraq" returns a plethora of news sources that corroborate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

This wasn’t “shady,” this was essentially a sting operation where they eventually seized 90 million dollars in cash and arrested over 100 people. Not bad. The bigger result was that it poisoned trust of banks by there kinds of criminals.

Professionals already have banks for that. 90 million dollars? These are small fishes. They only helped the bigger ones go get rid of the competition and the effect on drug trafficking is near zero.

From another perspective, consider it probably did not cost $90 million to execute this plan. So overall, this is a net profit, and most likely cost effective.

Was the plan to make profit or to reduce drug trafficking? Maybe they should reevaluate their goals.

The agency that seizes the money gets to keep it.

This person had his motel all paid off. So the Government decided to size it because they could sell it. He fought them off, barely:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2012/11/14/tewksbury-motel-owner-f...

It was a top secret plan spanning multiple countries likely run by corrupt officials, I think it probably cost more than 90 million!

> Everyone is surprised to find the government does shady stuff

I really don't understand how this is still possible with everyone having access to the Internet. They're pretty consistent [1]. It must be a bubble thing.

1. https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...

Man that has taken my breath away. I'm pretty aware of how terrible the west can be (and how we can lie about it) but the sheer volume there is immense.

Worth emphasizing, this isn't "the West", this is just the US. Not that other parts of "the West" don't warrant their own lists, but framing it this way unnecessarily cushions the blow.

True true, I'm from the UK and so I see us as complicit in some of this but yes the US seems to have a pretty good go at being awful to fellow humans.

You realize that list has events going back to the 1700’s, right?

If you want to talk about countries that have a pretty good go at being awful to fellow humans and we get to go that far back, I don’t think the UK would have an insignificant list.

It's kind of weird you felt the need to post this whataboutism three times in the same subthread, especially being that your main complaint is that the history is a complete history... I don't think this is the kind of behavior we want on HN.

This list contains a lot of sensationalized points. It literally has things going back to the 1700’s. With that kind of latitude you could condemn every major country.

Why would you assume the west is perfect? This list contains things from the 1700’s. Any country will have a laundry list of atrocities if we start that far back.

Politics is largely of a game of making simplifying over-generalizations about other people so you can attach negative labels to them.

Wow, thanks for that link.

NPR is using a clickbait headline. I fell for it just like you did. This conveys the opposite of what it actually is - "Govt Agents setup a fake bank in a sting to attract drug traffickers to launder money netting $90mm in cash and over 100 arrests".

No, I'm of the same opinion of croes and saul_goodman.

> they didn't nab any of the big players in the operation. So effectively they helped the biggest players by making it harder for the small to mid-tier drug cartels do conduct business.