This might be too big for them to hide:
More significant is that Sachs' article breaks the Times' silence about how Saddam's regime used oil vouchers to bribe potential goodwill ambassadors abroad. Sachs writes of the Rashid Hotel lobby, "where the oil traders would gather whenever a journalist, actor or political figure would arrive in Iraq and openly praise Mr. Hussein.
"Experience taught them that the visitor usually returned to the hotel with a gift voucher, courtesy of the Iraqi president or one of his aides, representing the right to buy one million barrels or more of Iraqi crude."
At last, some light on so many foreign visitors' otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm for the brutal regime.
Rather too briefly, Sachs mentions a list in the possession of the Iraqi Governing Council, originating with Saddam's State Oil Marketing Organization, of 267 companies and individuals who allegedly received allocations of oil vouchers during the oil for food program.
The list was first published in Baghdad in January (this newspaper wrote about it on Jan. 29); it names politicians from around the Arab world, a host of Russian companies and officials, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua - and George Galloway, the antiwar British pol who was one of the Saddam's key mouthpieces abroad.
The Times article mysteriously neglects to mention Galloway or some of the more startling names on the list - like President Sukarnoputri of Indonesia and Benon V. Sevan, the actual head of the U.N. Oil for Food program.
Then again, the Times' decision to mention the existence the Oil for Food bribe list only an entire month after it was made public in Iraq is even more mysterious.
This was a major story by anyone's reckoning. The "paper of record's" decision to keep silent on it (until the Iraqi Governing Council handed its reporter a massive dossier that could not be safely ignored) presumably had something to do with the paper's unstinting support of the United Nations as an alternative to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
The corruption and misuse of the Oil for Food program has long been an open secret.
The Left must verify reports on their comrades, where as reports on the Right are breaking news. In other words, the Right is guilty until proven otherwise and the Left is sacrosanct.