Posted on 07/15/2004 12:29:15 PM PDT by take
How Will A Corrupt United Nations Save The World?
It's almost incredible to imagine that a post-9/11 presidential candidate would not have any real policy ideas regarding Iraq and the war on terror, but that is exactly what John Kerry has offered us thus far.
In fact, Kerry recently stated that he was proud to have voted against legislation to fund our troops and wished he had not voted for the Iraq campaign at all.
When pressed for an answer as to what he might do to rectify the situation in Iraq and the war on terror, Kerry assures us that his first priority will be seek the assistance and approval of the United Nations. So, rather than perpetuate the feel-good myth of a Wilsonian United Nations that helps to foster democracy and solve the world's problems, let's take a brief tour of what we know about the U.N. as of late.
The Iraqi Oil-for-Food program of the Saddam era was a complete sham. The Iraqi people never received the food or medicine that the program was designed to secure, and the General Accounting Office has estimated that Saddam raised 4.4 billion dollars in illegal revenue by imposing illegal surcharges and commissions to suppliers of goods.
Not only were our upstanding and peace-loving "allies" in France the provider of the majority of those goods (many of them military in use) the United Nations administered the revenue from the Oil-for-Food program through the French bank Paribas.
And remember that the French and Russians were anxious to protect oil contracts they had recently signed with Iraq, and have used these contracts as a rationale for resisting the American effort to have Iraqi foreign debts forgiven.
The investigation into the corruption of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program is still on-going, but it is clear that none of the money raised was going to the needy Iraqi people, and it is also clear that a number of high-ranking U.N. officials profited directly from the scam -- although the United Nations refuses to indict them for doing so.
Meanwhile, in a scene out of a Tom Clancy novel, Ihsan Karim, the Iraqi official heading an independent investigation into the Oil-for-Food scandal within Iraq was killed a week ago when a bomb was placed under his car in Baghdad.
Yet, John Kerry has nothing but praise for the United Nations and believes we should solicit the institution for approval of our foreign policy decisions regarding the future of Iraq -- and the future of the United States.
In another recent development, two security guards at the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York were arrested and expelled from the country after repeatedly being observed touring and taking photographs of sensitive infrastructure sites in and around the city. Of course, the United Nations condemned -- the removal of the guards.
Remember, this is the same United Nations that elected pre-war Iraq to chair the Conference on Nuclear Disarmament, while Saddam was literally parading his missiles through the streets of Baghdad and threatening to dissolve Israel and Kuwait.
It is the same United Nations that elected Libya to chair the Commission on Human Rights, just as their government was admitting to responsibility for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. (I was a student at Syracuse University at the time and my friends perished on that flight.)
Finally, this is a United Nations that colluded with France and Russia to derail the war on terror and the Iraqi campaign so that its own corrupt members could continue to steal funds from the Oil-for-Food program and the French could protect lucrative contracts to sell weapons to Iraq that have likely been killing our soldiers since the campaign began.
Note that the French helped build the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in the 1970's (until the Israelis destroyed it) and are now defending their decision to build a nuclear power plant in Iran . The United Nations does not ask why a country with the oil reserves of Iran would need nuclear power -- apparently because of the transparent stupidity of the question.
Invoking the Wilsonian dream of what the United Nations once stood for, or stands for in theory, doesn't deal with the problem at hand. The problem is that the United Nations is rife with corruption and collusion; its members are literally untethered from reality; and it stands in support of a world government that is unelected and virtually unaccountable.
That we are told to look to this international body for guidance at this pivotal time isn't just an example of bad policy -- it borders on historic, Neville Chamberlain-like incompetence.
John Kerry is either truly oblivious to the realities we face, or he is willing to pander by pretending he is.
Thus, in casting a vote for him we would either have to believe that upon assuming office Kerry would suddenly transform himself from the muttering master of double-speak into a brave leader with a concise vision of how to protect us -- or prepare to surrender our fate to the will of our "friends" at the United Nations.
Thankfully, November won't be like the old Iraqi presidential elections. There will be more than one name on the ballot.
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.
It's all relative. If you live in a country that's more corrupt than the UN, then the UN might be able to help. John Kerry plans to make sure that that we will need the UN's help.
Well that's the first problem.
bttt
Some More Interesting historical news about kerry:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1091943/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1160580/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1165078/posts
Some of kerry's and his U.N. friends are listed below:
http://www.cpusa.org/
http://www.dsausa.org/
DSA's "Progressive Caucus" Links below:
http://bernie.house.gov/pc/
http://bernie.house.gov/pc/members.asp
They are the Enemy Within!!!!
I have at least one or two interesting posts about said such subject matter, below:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1165983/posts
And see:
http://tonkin.spymac.net/hanoikerry1.html
The last slash of the dragons tail
The only peace there will ever be for mankind...is in the return of God the Son in the person of Jesus Christ...
All these other things will come to pass in the order they are supposed to that the prophecies come to pass...that man might know who is God and of Him and who is not...
imo
Bump!
FMCDH(BITS)
Priceless line!
Thanks for the ping. I have pinged Shermy re this thread.

To Kofi Annan with love,Bart

Wow. First I've heard of this. Anyone else surprised by this?
To Kofi Annan with love,Bart
My thanks to Traumer, Arrowhead1952 and Conspiracy Guy for the concept of the above pic
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