Part One - Oil for Food Terrorist Connection? Iraq and Al Queda
Part Two - Oil for Food Terrorist
Connection? Iraq and Al Queda
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and son Kojo Saddham
Payoffs
News on one of several U.S.
Government Oil for Food Probes
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The United Nations
Oil-for-Food program has turned out to be the biggest scam in the history of
humanitarian relief. Oil-for-Food, which ran from 1996-2003, was designed
by the U.N. and managed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan along lines so perverse, so
secretive, so inviting to corruption, that it could hardly have turned out otherwise.
In theory, the U.N. was busy containing U.N. sanctioned tyrant Saddam Hussein while
helping the people of Iraq. But in practice, Oil-for-Food was less an aid effort than an
invitation to fraud, influence-peddling and continued tyranny in Iraq. It doubled as a
terrific employment program not for Saddam’s victims in Iraq, but Saddam’s Baath
Party and the United Nations.
Under the U.N. setup it was not even the U.N. but Saddam himself who got first rights to
draw up the shopping lists for what the people of Iraq were presumed to need. That was
disturbing given that it was Saddam who was responsible for the wars, oppression and
deprivation of Iraqis in the first place.
The U.N. let Saddam pick his own oil buyers and relief suppliers and negotiate his own
deals, subject to U.N. approval which, as it turned out, he routinely got on thousands of
contracts blatantly laced with graft. When asked who those contractors were, the
Oil-for-Food staff said the U.N. preferred to keep the identities of Saddam’s dealers
confidential. The U.N. also kept secret the dollar amounts of individual deals, and just
about all other details that would have allowed any third party to judge the integrity of
a business. Oil-for-Food was run as a secret, privileged bargain between the UN and
Saddam. To this day, the U.N. has not released such basic information. It is only through
leaked documents that the most incriminating details of Oil-for-Food can begin to be
gleaned.
To cover the costs of administering the program Kofi Annan’s Secretariat collected a
2.2% commission on Saddam’s oil sales, totaling $1.4 billion over the course of the
program, plus another .8%, or $520 million, for weapons inspections (though for four of
the program’s seven years, Saddam did not allow any weapons inspections). In other
words, the U.N. Secretariat was being paid richly by Saddam to supervise Saddam; the U.N.
had, in effect, become Saddam’s business partner. The incentives were for the U.N.
Secretariat to hush up Saddam’s graft, and keep expanding the program. And
that’s what happened.
Following Saddam’s overthrow, the U.N. finally shut down Oil-for-Food last November.
But the U.N. condoned mess it created it still with us. Billions in funds grafted out of
the program by Saddam have yet to be accounted for. Oil-for-Food tainted the Security
Council debates over Iraq, in which the U.N. never disclosed that fat deals under
Oil-for-Food had gone to such pivotal U.N. Security Council members as France, China and
Russia. To whatever extent Oil-for-Food corrupted politicians and businesses who dealt
with Saddam and that was evidently part of the problem some of the figures involved may
now be ripe targets for blackmail by anyone with inside information on Saddam’s
U.N.-condoned secret deals. And tucked away in those confidential records are enough
overlaps between Saddam’s network of dirty finance and Al Qaeda to warrant worries
that money he filched from Oil-for-Food may be funding terrorists today.
Claudia Rosett is a consultant to FOX News and Journalist-in-Residence at the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies
Click Here for Claudia Rosetts testimony before the House
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. |
