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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DizzyG who wrote (705804)	10/5/2005 11:09:33 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Work from the known facts and draw your own conclusions... everyone has got an agenda. (The most interesting point for me was the WILD exaggerations about the amount of money fraudulently obtained from the 'oil for food' program though. All that stuff about 'largest fraud in human history' and such bunk. Looks like some of the headline fraud numbers bandied about like '$10 Billion' or '$100 Billion' were off by an order of magnitude or more --- giving rise to the conclusion that the author of this article was not the only guy around with an agenda. :) About 1.8% out of over $100 Billion in total transactions gives the lie to some of those hyped-up headlines. 'Largest fraud in human history'? Unfortunately, it's not even close. Also of interest is that "Rarely mentioned ... in the press coverage, was the fundamental distinction between the policies established by the Secretariat and the U.N. agencies and the ... highly politicized Security Council. For example, the [Duelfer] report says that the bulk of the illicit transactions were "government-to-government agreements" between Iraq and a few other countries, for trade outside the OFF program."