greedy Texas oilmen
You're always yapping on and on about greedy oil interests. Do you think you could come up with a coherent and semi-intelligent response to this?? I won't hold my breath...
msnbc.msn.com
• April 29, 2004| 8:30 PM ET
IGNORING SCANDAL AT THE U.N.
by Glenn Reynolds
I wrote last week about UNScam, as the United Nations' oil-for-food scandal is being called by some. Since then, a lot more information has come out, and things look even worse than they did a week ago.
U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq from selling oil because of Saddam's refusal to disarm as he promised to after the Gulf War in 1991. The oil-for-food program was supposed to let Iraq sell some oil, with the money placed under close U.N. supervision so as to ensure that it went for food and medicine for ordinary Iraqis, not weapons and palaces for Saddam. Instead, the opposite seems to have happened.
How did Saddam do it? Bribery, apparently: the oil was laundered through middlemen, and lots of money seems to have found its way into the pockets of a lot of people. Some of them seem to have been the U.N. bureaucrats overseeing the program; others are even less savory, as Claudia Rosett notes:
And though much debate has focused on the list published this past January in the Iraqi newspaper Al Mada--cataloguing some 270 individuals and entities world-wide alleged to have received illicit oil vouchers worth millions from Saddam--the Al Mada list may be the least of it (apart from the last name of the executive director of the Oil-for-Food program himself, Benon Sevan). Dwarfing the Al Mada list for size, scope and menace was the U.N.-piloted mothership, the entire $111 billion U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Supplied by Iraq's oil wells, the sums involved in Oil-for-Food's transactions were so enormous that even the routine rounding errors of a few hundred million here or there easily rivaled, for example, the $300 million or so in family money believed to have given Osama bin Laden his terrorist start. . . .
In Oil-for-Food, "Every contract tells a story," says John Fawcett, a financial investigator with the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, which has sued the financial sponsors of Sept. 11 on behalf of the victims and their families. In an interview, Mr. Fawcett and his colleague, Christine Negroni, run down the lists of Oil-for-Food authorized oil buyers and relief suppliers, pointing out likely terrorist connections. One authorized oil buyer, they note, was a remnant of the defunct global criminal bank, BCCI. Another was close to the Taliban while Osama bin Laden was on the rise in Afghanistan; a third was linked to a bank in the Bahamas involved in al Qaeda's financial network; a fourth had a close connection to one of Saddam's would-be nuclear-bomb makers.
Oil-for-food appears to have morphed into oil-for-terror. The U.N. is investigating itself, but there's reason to doubt that it will work. As Australian journalist James Morrow writes:
Far worse was the abuse of oil given to "non-end users" (that is, not sold to refineries and petroleum companies). Documents found in Iraq's old ministry of oil reveal that hundreds of prominent individuals received vouchers to buy Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices and sell it on the open market -- at tremendous, often seven-figure, profits.
Those named include not just Sevan but a vast array of Russian politicians, close friends of French President Jacques Chirac (including France's former minister of the interior), British Labour MP George Galloway, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and, closer to home, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
In short, it's a who's who list of high-profile anti-war and anti-sanctions voices, all revealed to be shills for Saddam.
Morrow wonders why it isn't getting more attention from the media:
Amazingly, though, it has taken an incredible amount of time for this story to get what little traction it has so far gained in the media. (Certainly the anti-war Left, which is happy to believe that George W. Bush toppled Saddam to kick a few contracts to Dick Cheney's old pals at Halliburton, has been deafeningly silent on the topic.)
Perhaps because of all the DIY international lawyering engaged in by the world press corps in the run-up to Iraq's invasion, many journalists are reluctant to admit that the UN they put so much faith in was many times more corrupt than they could imagine the Bush White House being.
Is that an exaggeration? It's hard to say -- and one reason it's hard to say is that the records involved have "mysteriously vanished:"
WASHINGTON - The vast majority of the United Nations' oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.
The General Accounting Office report, presented at a congressional hearing into the scandal-plagued program, determined that 80 percent of U.N. records had not been turned over.
The world body claims it transferred all information it had - including 3,059 contracts worth about $6.2 billion for delivery of food and other civilian goods to the post-Saddam governing body, the Coalition Provisional Authority.
They're calling it the "biggest financial scandal in history," but it's getting a lot less attention than Enron, or even Martha Stewart, both of which led the news for weeks -- even though it seems quite likely that many Iraqis, especially children, died because they weren't getting the food and medicine that this program was supposed to provide.
You'd think that more people would care about this story, wouldn't you? I wonder why they don't seem to. |
