Audio By Carbonatix
John Sparks, KTVT-Channel 11’s exec producer in charge of investigations and political coverage, alerts us to a Robert Riggs report getting national play via the CBS News mothership. It involves “the theft of the century,” or close to it: the pilfering of millions of dollars’ worth of oil in Iraq, due to the absence of oil meters, which Riggs says is “a basic tool for preventing corruption, according to estimates by classified CIA and State Department reports, the Iraq Study Group Report, a former consultant to a U.S. oil company and a former State Department adviser to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.”
Riggs has been working on the story for six months, and it’s a doozy. Riggs reports that the “annual thefts run into the billions of dollars and help fuel insurgents, sectarian militias and corrupt officials — as well as deprive the Iraqis of much-needed money to run their struggling government.”
Like Ed Bark said earlier this week, just why aren’t more people watching Channel 11? Beat us. Or maybe you’re just into KXAS-Channel 5, where their idea of Big News is a car crashing into an Arlington convenience store. –Robert Wilonsky
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