Iraq's highest ranking anticorruption officer submits resignation; 'I cannot just sit in my place and see corruption eating the Iraqi state'

An armed guard poses beside pallets of $100 bills in Baghdad. In the year after the invasion 363 tons of cash were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of nearly $2.5 billion on June 22, 2004, six days before the handover of sovereignty. In total, $12 billion in cash was never accounted for.

Iraq's highest ranking anticorruption officer, Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, has asked Iraq's prime minister to accept his resignation and, in an interview Thursday, cited political pressure as the reason he sought to leave his job.

Judge Radhi is the chief of the Public Integrity Commission, which has initiated hundreds of corruption inquiries in the past three years, including investigations of several current and former cabinet members. He said the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had tried to limit his commission's scope and to close cases by saying they fell outside his purview and should be handled by the judiciary.

"I cannot just sit in my place and see corruption eating the Iraqi state, so I asked for retirement," said Judge Radhi, who is currently traveling in the United States. He added later that he had recently received anonymous threats on his life if he did not stop his work.

The judge has been much respected for trying to root out wrongdoing in Iraqi ministries, which are accused of being rife with corruption. But he has also made many enemies and has been criticized by some for his aggression in pursuing those cases. The commission sometimes had hundreds of investigations going simultaneously, only some of which resulted in charges. In some cases, the subjects of investigations fled when they believed they might be charged.

Read the rest at the International Herald Tribune

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