Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karin who wrote (17291)	9/22/2004 12:56:06 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Kofigate You have to admire the resilience of the United Nations. In theory, the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food relief program for Iraq, which ran from 1996-2003, is now the subject of at least five investigations into billions worth of alleged fraud and corruption. In practice, however, while U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan dismisses well-founded allegations as "outrageous," and President George W. Bush chalks out a big new role for the U.N. in Iraq, it is the investigators themselves who are now largely stalled, stymied, carefully contained, or even attacked. The attacks have not been limited to the U.S.-led armed raid last Thursday on the Baghdad home and office of Iraq Governing Council (IGC) member Ahmed Chalabi, in which — by Chalabi's account in a phone interview with me later that same day — U.S. forces seized documentation incriminating to U.N. officials "on every level." There has also been the harassment recently of a British adviser to the IGC, Claude Hankes-Drielsma. This past February, Hankes-Drielsma lined up KPMG International, an accounting firm, together with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a law firm, to carry out an audit of Oil-for-Food for the IGC. He testified before Congress last month that the KPMG investigation "is expected to demonstrate the clear link between those countries which were quite ready to support Saddam Hussein's regime for their own financial benefit, at the expense of the Iraqi people, and those that opposed the strict application of sanctions and the overthrow of Saddam." (Security Council members France, Russia and China come to mind.) Last Thursday, the same day as the raid on Chalabi, an as-yet unidentified person hacked into Hankes-Drielsma's computer and deleted all the files, as Hankes-Drielsma recounted to me in a phone interview. The computer expert called in to cope with damage "said he'd never seen anything quite like it. They deleted even the backup files," says Hankes-Drielsma. Asked if he has been physically threatened as well, Hankes-Drielsma, says, "No comment." Whatever the circumstances surrounding Chalabi, it ought to be obvious that he, the IGC, and Hankes-Drielsma deserve credit for being the first to call for an investigation into Oil-for-Food, something even Annan after much stonewalling finally conceded this past March was necessary... acepilots.com