03 Feb Oil for Food: Volcker Finally Delivers (or Does He)?
03.02.05
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The Interim Report from Paul Volcker’s Independent Inquiry Commission investigating the UN Oil-for-Food scandal has been out for barely two hours, and already the blogosphere is on the case (via instapundit) declaring it at once damning and a whitewash. Of course, it’s one thing to react to the report, it’s another to actually read through the (unbelievably boring) 246 page report.
Here is Annan’s statement, and here are some pre-release complaints about the Volcker Commission from Heritage suggesting it is likely to try to whitewash or downplay the scandal.
I hope you’ll spend as much time analyzing what is (or would be, if the media didn’t allow the right to dictate its agenda) the far more important scandal: the US’s conscious decision from 1998 and 2002 to allow Saddam to violate the UN sanctions by selling oil to Jordan and Turkey — willful blindness justified, as always, in the name of “national security.”
As CNN International notes:
Estimates of how much revenue Iraq earned from these tolerated side sales of its oil to Jordan and Turkey, as well as to Syria and Egypt, range from $5.7 billion to $13.6 billion.
This illicit revenue far exceeds the estimates of what Saddam pocketed through illegal surcharges on his U.N.-approved oil exports and illegal kickbacks on subsequent Iraqi purchases of food, medicine, and supplies — $1.7 billion to $4.4 billion — during the maligned seven-year U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.
CNN-I appears to be the only major media outlet focusing on the story — the LA Times relegates it to paragraph 16 of an article misleadingly entitled “All Players Gain from Oil-for-Food.”
The CNN-I story is here:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/02/iraq.oil.smuggle/index.html
The fundamental problem with the U.N. is that it has no accountability for its actions.