The cash came from an account at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and was allegedly a combination of Iraqi oil revenue, surplus from the UN's oil for food programme, and sales of Iraqi assets.
The New York Fed is refusing to tell investigators how many billions of dollars it shipped to Iraq during the early days of the US invasion there, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction told CNBC Tuesday.
The Fed's lack of disclosure is making it difficult for the inspector general to follow the paper trail of billions of dollars that went missing in the chaotic rush to finance the Iraq occupation, and to determine how much of that money was stolen.
-CNBC
The Fed is claiming that the money belonged to the Iraqi people, and therefore, they aren't allowed to let anyone else know how much money actually went over to Iraq for reconstruction. However, since the Iraqi people never got the money, and they're wondering where the hell it went, it's a little hard to believe that the Fed can't get authorization from them to disclose how much of their money it allegedly shipped to them.
Clearly, the Fed just doesn't want anyone to know how much money was sent over, because then we'd know how much of it was stolen.