 My name is Matthew Ho. I served in the Iraq War in a variety of capacities. Every day of my life, I was involved with the Iraq War from its inception and its run-up in 2002 up until I went to Afghanistan in 2009. Every day in between those seven years, I worked on the Iraq War, whether I was in Iraq or I was in Washington, D.C. I worked at a variety of levels. I saw the war from all aspects. From senior levels, I was with the Secretary of the Navy's office, directly with the Secretary of the Navy's office in Washington, D.C. I worked for the Iraq Policy and Operations Group, so the reports I wrote on Iraq went directly to the Secretary of State, to the Vice President, to the President, as well then, to being a Marine officer in Iraq, having that had taken part in combat leading Marines, being part of occupation force, as well as being a for lack of a better term, colonial administrator. I was part of a State Department team and I was in charge of reconstruction. I was in charge of politics for provinces in North Central Iraq. One of my positions in Iraq, the first time I was in Iraq in 2004, 2005, I was in Tikrit and I was part of a State Department team and I was responsible for the reconstruction work in four provinces. I was a 31-year-old man at that point with not a lot of experience, particularly to have that degree of responsibility, but no one else ever showed up. They never staffed those government positions. They never, when I say they, the United States government never provided the proper oversight to take care of that massive $16 billion reconstruction program. I myself was responsible for a number of programs and many of those programs were done in cash. One program of mine that was done in cash, when I mean cash, it was a vacuum sealed $100 bills straight from the Federal Reserve was $50 million. The most I ever had in my possession at one time was $26 million in cash that I kept in my bedroom in two states. I had an AK-47 and a small 32 caliber pistol I could put it in my suit pocket and that was what I did. I paid for these construction projects. We tried to utilize these construction projects in a manner that was going to help us win hearts and minds. This is the whole counterinsurgency principle. The notion that General Petraeus came up with counterinsurgency the years later in the war was just a public relations stunt. We were doing that type of work in Iraq well before General Petraeus became the darling of the media and the American Congress. But what witnessed though was just a vast giveaway, just a vast racket. The legalized corruption that was available to American corporations in Iraq was just tremendous. The amount of money that they were able to collect, the billions and billions of dollars that were supposed to be utilized to make the lives of the Iraqi people better that just stayed in the United States runs into the double digit billions. So you just had this frenzied circumstance where there is almost no government oversight. Corporations were allowed to do what they wanted to in Iraq. Of course you had the excesses with the private security and everything too but just the amount of money that was stolen from the Iraqi people. Whether it was their money originally because of money that haven't seized by the United Nations or whether it was money appropriated by the U.S. Congress, the vast majority of that just ended up in the pockets of American corporations. So you have this program that again runs 16 billion dollars that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the United Nations, other independent audits have found there's really no evidence of any successful work being done. But you have the United States thousands of thousands of people who now own second homes, who now drive BMWs, who have benefited from this mass expenditure of money. And the sickening thing about this what makes it so grotesque is of course underlying all that are the million dead Iraqis. So it really was. I mean this was a corporate giveaway, this was a racket unknown I think in in the history of warfare in the way it became a bonanza for private business. And again this is all on top of the one million dead Iraqis, the millions and millions of Iraqis who were forced from their homes and the endless suffering that still goes on today. And so it's appropriate for this tribunal to call for investigations, to call for audits, and to call for criminal penalties against these men and women who orchestrated this racket. So again I want to thank the People's Tribunal for this opportunity to speak about these issues.