Baghdad's black hole.

A briefing paper presented at the Iraq Donor's Conference in Madrid reported that "billions of dollars of oil money" transferred from Iraq's oil industry to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "has effectively disappeared into a financial black hole." "For all the talk of freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people--before, during and after the war which toppled Saddam Hussein--there is no way of knowing how the vast majority of the money has been spent," declares "Iraq: The Missing Billions," a report compiled by the British humanitarian group Christian Aid.

"Before the war many people assumed that Iraqi reconstruction would be financed by Iraqi oil revenues," continues the document. "After all, Iraq has the second biggest oil reserves in the world. However, Iraqi oil reserves cannot begin to cover the costs of reconstruction...." By the aid group's reckoning, the CPA has accounted for only $1 billion of the $5 billion in oil revenues and Iraqi government funds it controlled through mid-October.