Posted on 07/13/2004 7:10:21 AM PDT by take
Edited on 07/13/2004 7:13:51 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
More oil for Hussein AS THE HOUSE Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee convened a hearing on the United Nations' oil-for-food program last week, Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, asked a good question:
Is the purpose of the hearing "to conduct proper oversight and ensure accountability so that Iraqi oil revenues get to the Iraqi people, or is it, to be blunt about it, simply to bash the United Nations?"
I figure the answer is: both. The General Accounting Office investigated the program and figured that Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed $10.1 billion through smuggling and oil-for- food kickbacks between 1997 and 2002.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
No one is that stupid!
These Democrat Party members are traitors to the United States of America.
If that isn't evident by now, it never will be.
German companies named in dossier
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2584975.stm
Talking in the only language this corrupt institution knows: money.
How much is 10% anyways?
Well of course Tom's upset about UN-bashing.
This would be akin to an American defending the Constitution.
Maine continues to embarrass itself on the world stage.
Well, this wasn't very fair and balanced. They should have printed where Allen protested against the 9/11 commission being used as a witch hunt against the president. The SFGate is such a right wing paper. (To shut the sarcasm off for a moment, the article actually was decent.)
U.S. Financial Contributions to the UN
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/24236.htm
The United States is the largest financial contributor to the UN and has been every year since its creation in 1945. We provided more than $3 billion in contributions, both cash and in-kind, to the UN system in 2002. (In-kind contributions include items such as food donations for the World Food Program). The United States funded 22 percent of the UN regular budget, as well as more than 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget. Additionally, the United States provides a significant amount in voluntary contributions to the UN and UN-affiliated organizations and activities, mostly for humanitarian and development programs.
Thanks much!
Thanks for the link.
My point is that little SOB, Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, asked :
Is the purpose of the hearing "to conduct proper oversight and ensure accountability so that Iraqi oil revenues get to the Iraqi people, or is it, to be blunt about it, simply to bash the United Nations?"
This vermin, along with his cohorts, will bring about the collapse of this nation.
Now addmitedly, this statement is seen by many to be over reacting.
Consider these statements: Click here
After reading that, re-read this:
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear."
Marcus Tullius Cicero - (106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Speech in the Roman Senate - 42 B.C.
Thanks to Freeper "expatguy"
Now consider my first statement ...
"This vermin, along with his cohorts, will bring about the collapse of this nation."
Please see my post # 9 ?
Please see sarcasm reference and tag line.
I know we are on the same page. I just wanted to show off. ;)
Scandal at the U.N.
he cover-up in the office of the U.N. secretary general of a multibillion-dollar financial fraud known as the Iraqi oil-for-food program is beginning to come apart.
The scandal has been brewing for years. The first I learned of it was in a New York Times Op-Ed article last April by the journalist Claudia Rosett charging that the U.N.'s secretive oversight of more than $100 billion in Iraqi oil exports and supposed humanitarian imports was "an invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and smuggling done under cover of relief operations."
After checking with Kurdish sources in Iraq, I reported that half the money allocated to their people had been blocked by Saddam "conspiring with bureaucrats in the U.N. Plaza."
Kofi Annan's right-hand man, Benon Sevan, had been named by the secretary general to head the oil-for-food program and report directly to him. Though he could not deny a favored French banking connection, Sevan branded as "inaccuracies" charges by Ms. Rosett and me of secrecy, citing a hundred audits in five years. But he refused to make public what companies in what countries got Saddam's largess.
Now, thanks to evidence of systematic thievery on a huge scale, discovered by free Iraqis in Baghdad, the whole rotten mess of 10 percent kickbacks on billions in contracts is coming to light. In detailed accounts, Susan Sachs in The Times, Therese Raphael in The Wall Street Journal, and Charles Laurence and Inigo Gilmore of London's Daily Telegraph have flipped over the flat rock of corruption.
Assistant Secretary General Sevan, now on an extended vacation until his retirement next month, denied through a spokesman "that I had received oil or oil monies from the former Iraqi regime" and demanded that his doubters produce documentary evidence. The Journal then produced a document in Arabic that suggests Sevan received an allocation of 1.8 million barrels of oil.
Under the U.N. bureaucracy's nose — and I suspect, in some cases, with its collusion — nearly three-quarters of the suppliers jacked up their prices to pay the 10 percent kickback. These included European manufacturers, Arab trade brokers, Russian factories and Chinese state-owned companies. Corruption's take — out of the mouths of hungry Iraqi children — was estimated by Sachs of The Times at $2.3 billion.
Hired by the U.N. to monitor these imports was a Swiss-based firm, Cotecna, which was paid out of the exorbitant fee the U.N. charged for overhead. Ms. Rosett, writing in National Review last week, notes that Kojo Annan, the secretary general's son, was once on staff and later a consultant to that tight-lipped company. In denying to The Telegraph in 1999 that he worked on the U.N. oil-for-food account, Kojo Annan said, "The decision is made by the contracts committee, not by Kofi Annan."
About that "661 compliance committee," on which the U.S. has a seat and to which the secretary general now wants to pass the buck: a U.S. official familiar with its operation tells me that "its purpose was formally to approve what the U.N. staff recommended. Only the U.S. and the U.K. experts ever put a hold on a contract, and that about items that had dual use in weaponry. Few U.S. firms got contracts, and those that did worked through middlemen to avoid the General Accounting Office."
Annan's office kept blaming the 661 committee and stonewalling the press until an irate Iraqi Governing Council hired the accountants KPMG and a law firm to investigate what its advisers told Annan was "one of the world's most disgraceful scams."
Under mounting pressure, this week the U.N. let it be known that its laughably titled Office of Internal Oversight Services would look into the matter. An internal whitewash? Not nearly good enough.
Will the Security Council appoint an independent counsel to clean house in an inept or corrupt Secretariat? No, because France and Russia had their hands in the kickback till.
But free Iraq, backed up by the U.S., is not helpless. Our Congress supplies 22 percent of the U.N. budget, and we have a right to an accounting. Chairman Henry Hyde, of House International Relations, calls this "an outrage" and will arrange for a G.A.O. briefing this week, to be followed by open hearings in April.
The U.N. can redeem its sullied reputation by helping to shape Iraq's future. To take up that challenge, it must have clean hands.
Thanks for the info ...
"The U.N. can redeem its sullied reputation by helping to shape Iraq's future. To take up that challenge, it must have clean hands."
To redeem itself it must be completely dismantled, from top to bottom, and rebuilt. And in our image.
Cool!
Consider this explanation, by U.N. spokesman Dujarric: "So, when we were made aware of these instances of kickbacks, of improprieties, we did inform the Security Council. But we were not mandated to police the contractors; it's not the way the program was set up by the Security Council members."
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