Peter Moore’s release from Iraq/ran over the Xmas period has been a cause for national rejoicing. But the story behind the 2-year kidnapping and imprisonment is much more sinister, as revealed by the remarkable Guardian investigation. Moore’s job as a computer specialist was to instal a sophisticated tracking system to uncover the huge sums of international aid money from Iraqi institutions that went missing, diverted to Iran’s militia groups in Iraq. The extent of this has been estimated in evidence given to the US Congress at about £11bn in recent years. This is a staggering figure of institutional corruption, even by the standards of the notoriously leaky, incompetent and bribe-ridden Iraqi ministries, and it raises a series of uncomfortable questions. When was this grand larceny of aid monies and oil revenues first noticed, and why wasn’t determined action to identify and stamp it out taken much earlier before it reached these enormous levels? After Moore was abducted, has it now been stopped? If so, which ministries and which politicians/bureaucrats were involved, and what action has been taken against them? Above all, how was this allowed to develop on this huge scale under the nose of the US/UK authorities in the first place?

Then there is the grisly question of the killing of the four British bodyguards when the Foreign Office refused to negotiate a ransom. This is an awful dilemma for any government, but the argument that no deal will be done with terrorists has now been compromised again, as it has often been in the past, by the deal finally struck to secure Moore’s release. The US/UK agreed to hand over as a quid pro quo Qais al-Khazali, a radical Shia cleric and leading member of the Righteous League, a group of Iranian-backed Shia militants. Instead of being tough on terrorists, the final tally looks rather different. The Iranian al-Quds abductors stopped the computer spy-work in its tracs at the outset (unless it has been substituted by a similar operation) and got back not only Khazali, but also several hundred former Shia detainees. The UK got back Peter Moore and the bodies of 3 bodyguards.
The problem of institutional corruption which has grown to a monumental scale in recent years and decades has been largely unacknowledged or connived at. There are many, many other examples than Iraq. The diversion of massive oil revenues by Saddam Hussein’s scam to circumvent the UN oil embargo stole up to $90bn over a decade through a network of international collusion. Rumsfeld admitted to the US Congress under questioning in 2002 that a sum of $2-3 trillions (yes, trillions) was unaccounted for in the Pentagon records over the previous period. The auditors have refused to sign off the EU accounts for more than a decade on the grounds that they are not satisfied that large-scale embezzlement has not taken place. Mafia revenues from corporate corruption from protection rackets and money laundering has been estimated at over $40bn over the last decade, and not just in Italy. The £40bn UK-Saudi al-Yamama arms deal agreed by Thatcher in 1985 is now widely believed to have involved a huge level of government-backed BAE bribery so damaging that SFO investigation was vetoed by Blair. As usual, the whole issue revolves around the central question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? At present, it seems, nobody.

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