Austin Bay Blog

The Oil For Food scandal is back on the front-burner, if not on the front page of MSM papers. I still think of Oil For Food as Oil For Iraqi Blood– the Iraqi people paid the hard price for the UN’s scam. (After surveying one of Saddam’s marble mega-mansions, GEN Tommy Franks dubbed the program “Oil For Palaces.”)

Claudia Rosett has the scoop (ht Instapundit) via National Review.

Her article describes UN Oil For Food administrator Benon Sevan’s trail of corruption and his new “travails” vis a vis the Volcker investigation. Why, he can’t get hold of any information to defend himself. The article also sketches a few of Sec-Gen Kofi Annan’s cover-up techniques– how the UN jinks and jives a program when big money’s involved. The Sec-Gen and his minions know how to use a bureaucracy to screen corrupt companies, hide connections to tyrants, and futz investigators.

Rosett reports:

Sevan’s recent experience of scrolling one page at a time through highly limited sets of U.N. documents, trying to piece together shreds and scraps of information, is an excellent description of what it was like during the Oil-for-Food era for anyone outside the U.N. seeking to know who was doing U.N.-approved business with Saddam — and on what terms. The United Nations did not disclose the names of the contractors, the price, quantity, or quality of goods. The U.N. provided no public accounting for the billions in bank balances, the interest collected, the letters of credit amended or even the $1.4 billion cut of Saddam’s oil sales collected by Annan’s secretariat to run the program (from which the Volcker inquiry is now drawing its $34 million budget, for which there has also been no public accounting).

Contrary to Annan’s and Sevan’s public statements, many of these vital details — especially concerning contracts, bank statements, and letters of credit — the U.N. did not even turn over to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. According to numerous sources, what the CPA got from the U.N. when it inherited the program in late 2003 was a welter of corrupted files and incomplete documentation. For months the U.N. treasury did not even deign to forward information either to the CPA or the Iraqi central bank on the billions still in the U.N.-managed Oil-for-Food escrow accounts.

During Oil-for-Food, the U.N. insisted on confidentiality for Saddam and the clusters of front companies he dealt with in places such as Switzerland, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and Panama — an abuse of the Iraq relief program that even minimal sunlight could have done much to expose. But in the U.N.’s public records, for example, an outfit such as Al Wasel & Babel, designated last year by Treasury as a front company for Saddam’s own regime, appeared simply as a nameless contractor in the United Arab Emirates, selling such generic goods as “toilet soap” and “minibuses” — contracts only later revealed to have involved hundreds of millions worth of suspect deals…

She adds:

…loads of important information remains buried in the U.N. records to which the Volcker committee claims monopoly rights. Much of what has leaked from the U.N., or even been released by Volcker, appears in formats every bit as difficult to search as the artificially constricted files to which the frustrated Sevan would like easier access. Volcker released a set of “company tables” last fall, which gave at least some official confirmation of the names of some of the Oil-for-Food contractors, and totals for some of the deals. But Volcker apparently struck off the list some of the contracts, and in some cases the contractors, that turned up on Saddam’s agenda late in the program — and following Saddam’s overthrow were then dropped, in some cases because the contractors ran for the hills. In other words, gone missing from Volcker’s presumably comprehensive list are some of Saddam’s fishiest U.N.-approved deals.

In any event, the format of Volcker’s Oil-for-Food tables qualifies less as a help to outside investigators than as a bad joke. ..

Her conclusion:

…If Sevan is serious about opening up U.N. records, his best bet is to pay a call to congressional investigators, and start by opening up himself — not just in his own defense, but about the inner workings of the entire Oil-for-Food program, including the complicity of his boss, Kofi Annan. Had the UN come clean years ago, this colossal scandal might never have happened.

Sevan Must Serve Time and Kofi Must Go. Is this John Bolton’s first job? It’s a tough one, given the bashing he’s taken by the DC Dems and the establishment media.