WSJ - Saddams UN Payroll

I brought more than 3 paragraphs over for the excerpt
because registration is required at The Wall Street Journal
and I figured some folks wouldn't want to register.
This is still just an excerpt - but if the mods want to cut
it back to less paragraphs, please feel free to do so.

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REF the article - I hope this spells the end of Koffi Annans
reign at that corrupt cesspool called the United Nations.
I hope people will wake up to the fact that France and
Russia vetoed going into Iraq and saving lives, not because
of any moral stand but because they had their own illegal
multi billion $$$$ deals with Saddam and they thought more
of the $$$ than human life in Iraq.

Combine the information in the UN Oil for Food Scandel and
the newly emerging facts that Russia probably moved the
allegedly missing 380 (really THREE) tons of explosives
(at Saddams order) to Syria before America liberated Iraq ...
and you get a nasty and messy UN/France/Russia triangle of
disgusting corruption that stinks to high heaven. America
should take careful note of these things and let the full impact
and meaning sink in.

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Saddam's U.N. Payroll

Oil for Food bribery means sanctions against Iraq were doomed to fail.
The Wall Street Journal
Thursday, October 28, 2004

(excerpt)
Out on the campaign trail, John Kerry continues to diminish our allies in Iraq and decry President Bush for "rushing" to war without U.N. Security Council approval. But we hope his would-be Secretaries of State, Biden and Holbrooke, are paying attention in private to revelations about the crumbling sanctions regime they would have had us continue and the related corruption in the U.N.'s Oil for Food program.

These folks are in for a rude awakening if they really think Old Europe will be rushing to help a President Kerry in Iraq, or that the United Nations is competent and trustworthy enough to manage their foreign policy projects.

The latest pieces of news are last week's data dump from Paul Volcker's U.N.-blessed investigation of Oil for Food, and U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer's report to Congress earlier this month. Everybody is still digesting these massive documents. But the most important conclusion is already clear: Saddam Hussein exploited the program to run the largest bribery scheme in the history of the world.

Yes, we mean that literally. Total turnover between 1996 and 2003 was about $97 billion, or $64.2 billion in oil sales and $32.9 billion worth of food and other "humanitarian" goods. Crucially, Saddam was able to manipulate the program largely because U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan--who was given more or less complete discretion to design Oil for Food by the Security Council resolution that created it--allowed him to pick and choose the buyers of his oil and the sellers of the humanitarian goods.

This meant the Iraq dictator could reward his friends and political allies with oil at below market prices and goods contracts at inflated ones. In the middle of the program, he also started demanding kickbacks on the contracts to add to the stream of unmonitored revenue he was already getting from oil smuggling.

It can't be stressed enough that both the Duelfer and Volcker investigations confirm that this global web of corruption is no mere allegation trumped up by Ahmed Chalabi and "neoconservatives," as U.N. officials tried to pretend in January when Iraq's al Mada newspaper published a list of the oil voucher recipients.

Mr. Duelfer's list of recipients--which more or less confirms al Mada's--was compiled based on information from current and former Iraqi officials and lists maintained by former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan (now in U.S. custody) and the former Iraqi Oil Minister. Mr. Volcker's lists--which include the 248 companies that bought Iraqi oil under the program and the 3,545 companies supplying humanitarian goods--are compiled from the U.N.'s own records and cross-checked against Iraqi and other sources, including the French bank BNP Paribas that administered program revenues.

High-level officials of Saddam's regime have told investigators that oil and goods contracts were always awarded with an eye to helping Saddam politically, particularly to promote the lifting of the sanctions. The Volcker data bears this out. Iraq's top customer was Russia, whose firms bought $19.2 billion worth of Iraq oil and exported $3.3 billion in humanitarian goods. Fellow Security Council member France was a distant but significant second, at $4.4 billion and $2.9 billion respectively. China is also high on the list.

Oil voucher recipients are alleged to include the Russian presidential office, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, and even former Oil for Food program director Benon Sevan of the U.N. Just this week our news side colleagues reported that French authorities have placed under formal investigation a top official of French oil giant Total, for possible misuse of funds including payment of the Iraqi kickbacks. Before the war Total was also openly courting Baghdad for the rights to develop two large Iraqi oil fields.

Against this backdrop, it is impossible to take Secretary-General Annan seriously when he calls it "inconceivable" that this could have affected the Security Council's handling of Iraq. "I don't think the Russian or the French or the Chinese government would allow [themselves] to be bought," he said recently. But even in the unlikely event that they weren't too worried about the possible financial losses, they surely never wanted this information to see the light of day.

Read the rest here.

[edit on 10/28/2004 by FlyersFan]

I don't have anything to add, I just appreciate your placement of it on ATS. Funny how, when corruption seems to be coming from outside the white house, the ATS silence is deafening.

Originally posted by dr_strangecraft

I don't have anything to add, I just appreciate your placement of it on ATS. Funny how, when corruption seems to be coming from outside the white house, the ATS silence is deafening.

I think the silence from Fox after American firms started showing up on lists is deafening.

They used to have reports on the Oil for Food scandal almost every day it seemed. Now, you hardly ever hear about it.

It's possible the election coverage and other stories just took precedence but I think maybe it just wasn't as good a story for them when it didn't just involve France, China and Russia.

France issued a statement on this, saying that out of the of 1,129 companies from 86 countries on a list of registered buyers under the oil-for-food program, only 20 were French.

They also say that some of the countries listed as French were branches, agents or intermediaries for companies in other countries.

Also, the French bank BNP Paribas was located in the United States and was subject to U.S. regulations


France Challenges Oil-For-Food Report

Related ATS thread:
Iraq's Oil Buyers

Originally posted by AceOfBase
I think the silence from Fox after American firms started showing up on lists is deafening.

What FOX silence? They talk about it all the time.
I watch FOX. Just a few hours ago on Fox n Friends they
were talking about it. You must be thinking of some other
station. FOX is on this, however, I wonder about CBS and
the other liberal MSM. Are they talking about it at all?

Originally posted by FlyersFan

What FOX silence? They talk about it all the time.
I watch FOX. Just a few hours ago on Fox n Friends they
were talking about it. You must be thinking of some other
station. FOX is on this, however, I wonder about CBS and
the other liberal MSM. Are they talking about it at all?

I watch Fox all the time and I haven't seen any reports on it in the last few days.

When they do mention it, it seems to be just to bash France or the UN instead of a report.

They used to have that guy Jonathan Hunt on all the time but I haven't seen him on much recently.

Did they do a report today and I just missed it?

Originally posted by AceOfBase
Did they do a report today and I just missed it?

Fox n Friends - sometime between 7:00 a.m. and 8:30 or so
(sorry, can't be more nailed down than that).

They restated what was going on. No new news...
but they aren't letting it die either (which I appreciate).

I agree ATS silence on this subject is deafening! Just look at the number of replies! The UN is corrupt and should be removed from our soil. I think Tehran would be good.

The inquiry goes on, that's what's important. Didn't I see in that article that France was cooperating with the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman?

The corruption in this scandal should be prosecuted to the fullest... when we know the whole picture. If French companies did indeed benefit from the scandal, then they should be prosecuted - and if some American companies also profited, they should be prosecuted too.