Posted on 05/06/2005 9:54:58 AM PDT by ConservativeMan55
Per Foxnews Alert!
Looks like Kofi Annan may be going down. Foxnews has obtained video tapes of Kofi Annan and Paul Volcker.
There are inconsistencies in Kofi Annan's statements. In other words...he's been caught red handed!
I posted this to someone else, but I think it is an important point.
I think that the people at risk are those testifying before the committee. Parton took with him a large volume of documents, despite having signed a confidentiality agreement. This is the crux of the issue that jeopardizes the rest of the investigation. The investigation may as well shut down once they make those documents public, no matter what the documents prove.
You're right......good point.
Eva,
Perhaps you are right. I just can't resist thinking that Volcker was hand picked by Annan to sanitize this "investigation" and do damage control for the UN.
What Parton has done may be "dirty pool" to the career diplomats and UN bureaucrats but essential to blowing the lid off the mess.
No one is covering for Volcker or Kofi, they are covering for the Clintons. The people who would be brought down by this scandal know stuff that they will DEFINETLY sell for leniency.
That is the stuff that is behind the protection of the U.N. and the zeal against John Bolton at the same time. When people get fired, and they are under a threat of jail time, they will talk. When they talk, all roads for the last 10 years will go right back to the Clintons.
I just don't trust anyone who enlists the help of Lanny Davis. I also have ask how it is ok for Parton to steal secret documents from Volker's committee, but not for Sandy Berger. We just have to be careful that we do not fall into the same trap as those NYT reporters who demanded the investigation into the Valerie Plame incident and got unintended consequences. I think it would be better to send Volker a message that if he does not produce a better result than Ken Starr, that the investigation will recieve more scrutiny and not be the last word. Right now, we are handing the tools with which to whitewash the whole security council.
Valid points that shouldn't leave the forefront of this, especially with the arrival of Lanny Davis on the scene.
Here the WSJ article: (Ask yourself who has the most to gain by pinning the whole thing on Kofi Annan, a preventing further testimony)
The Volcker Contretemps
Republicans chase the wrong target on Oil for Food.
Friday, May 6, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Paul Volcker's probe of the United Nations' Oil for Food program has already turned over many rocks, and promises to turn over many more now that it is looking into the Security Council's oversight of the corrupt sanctions regime on Iraq. But all of a sudden the U.S. Congress seems more concerned with Mr. Volcker's credibility than with the U.N.'s. Leave it to Republicans to expose the capillaries but leave the heart of the matter untouched.
We're referring to the contretemps involving Congress, the Volcker Committee and one of the Committee's former investigators, a man named Robert Parton. Mr. Parton and fellow investigator Miranda Duncan resigned last month from the Committee, apparently because they believe the most recent interim report was too soft on Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Both investigators are bound by confidentiality agreements they signed with the Committee, but Mr. Parton carried away a load of documents that Representative Henry Hyde's Committee on International Relations has now subpoenaed.
At the same time, Mr. Hyde's Republican colleague, Connecticut Congressman Chris Shays, has written Mr. Volcker to complain that the findings on Mr. Annan were "oddly muted and almost purposefully vague," as if to suggest a whitewash. Mr. Shays has also accused Mr. Volcker's Committee of "reflexive secrecy or legalism," because it objects to the Parton subpoena. Mr. Parton has also surfaced with Beltway operative and former Clinton defender Lanny Davis as his legal counsel and adviser. Mr. Davis waited nearly a week to tell Mr. Volcker that Mr. Parton had been subpoenaed. Mr. Davis says he kept silent on the orders of Mr. Hyde's Committee, but it does raise the issue of which parties are really the ones keeping secrets.
From our own reporting and reading of Mr. Volcker's evidence, we understand how reasonable people can differ on how much Mr. Annan really knew about the bidding by a company called Cotecna that employed his son and won Iraqi Oil for Food contracts. Mr. Parton apparently thinks there is no way Mr. Annan couldn't have known. We happen to agree. But the Volcker Committee decided that it had found no smoking gun and so concluded that it had found "not reasonably sufficient evidence." Mr. Annan took that judgment from the interim report and claimed "exoneration"--when of course it was no such thing. No wonder many in Congress are angry.
But for Republicans to now focus their attention on the bona fides of the Volcker probe because of the claims of a disgruntled investigator is to shoot the wrong target. Sure it will get some good headlines for the Members, and it may even further damage Mr. Annan's credibility. But it will also damage the Volcker probe, perhaps irreparably, and just when his Committee is getting into the meat of the scandal, which is why and how Oil for Food got started and why it was allowed to prop up Saddam Hussein for so many years.
Put simply, the Volcker Committee will be crippled if it cannot guarantee its witnesses--many of them not beyond reproach--that their confidential testimony won't end up being aired on C-SPAN as part of a Congressional hearing. This is especially so since many of the Committee's witnesses are not U.S. citizens and could not be compelled to cooperate with a Congressional or Justice Department investigation.
"All investigations that confront serious allegations of fraud, corruption, misuse and mismanagement must enjoy a degree of secrecy as evidence is being gathered," Mr. Volcker wrote Mr. Shays yesterday. "It is also part and parcel of maintaining mutual confidence among staff members so that they can feel free to debate issues fully among themselves."
The most preposterous implication is that somehow Mr. Volcker signed up for this unenviable task in order to engineer a coverup. So a former Federal Reserve Chairman would risk soiling a distinguished career in order to protect the U.N. Secretariat?
As it is, what the Volcker Committee has already turned up is remarkable. We have learned that Benon Sevan, the U.N. bureaucrat responsible for Oil for Food, may have made money on the deal; that the U.N.'s selection of the program's prime contractors did not conform to its own rules; and that Mr. Annan's former chief of staff shredded potentially relevant documents even as Mr. Volcker's investigation was getting under way.
We have also learned that Kojo Annan met repeatedly with Iraqi officials in Nigeria in 1998 and later received as much as $484,000 from Cotecna. Not least, we have learned that it was Kofi Annan's own lax management, and his easy mixing of diplomacy with business, that created the conditions in which Mr. Sevan thrived. If this is a coverup, we need more of them.
We aren't conspiracy theorists, but from the point of view of the U.N.'s most rabid defenders it's hard to imagine a better turn of events than this Congressional detour. Preoccupy the Volcker Committee with this side issue until its funding runs out in August. Chill its investigators, and its witnesses, into inactivity or silence. Damage Mr. Volcker's personal reputation, so that any final report can be attacked as suspect. The only people thrilled with all this must be the people who profited from Oil for Food.
He's waaaay slicker than we know....He will bring the suit against congress that Volcker threatened, I am sure.
Richard Goldstone served on UN war crime tribunal
Jurist lectures April 25 on 'The Future
of International Criminal Justice'
MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—The Rohatyn Center for International Affairs presents a lecture, "The Future of International Criminal Justice," by the Honorable Richard J. Goldstone on Monday, April 25, at 4:30 p.m. in McCardell Bicentennial Hall 216.
Goldstone has been a member of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program (better known as the Volcker oil-for-food commission); is a former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; and is a former Justice, Constitutional Court of South Africa.
“Since 1991, Justice Richard J. Goldstone has been at the forefront of one of the biggest challenges facing emerging democracies today—how to address grave, systematic human rights abuses committed by leaders of the previous regime," wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "From his experience on the Goldstone Commission investigating political violence in South Africa, to his tenure as the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, he has witnessed first-hand the difficulty of achieving accountability for crimes of mass violence.â€
Goldstone practiced law in his native South Africa, eventually serving as an appeals judge of the Supreme Court from 1989-1994. After the end of the apartheid era, he helped draft the new South African constitution, and served as a justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa until 2003.
Simultaneously, from 1994 to 1996 he served as the first chief prosecutor for the first international war crimes trials since Nuremberg, and in 1998 chaired a committee, which drafted a Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities for UNESCO (the Valencia Declaration). He also chaired an international independent inquiry on Kosovo (investigating allegations of war crimes), and was appointed as co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Task Force on Terrorism.
Justice Goldstone is presently teaching at Harvard Law School, and has just completed work as a member of the investigatory body examining the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.
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googles link to this removed page is still in the cache:
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:8kPc_Pop3ZoJ:www.middlebury.edu/about/newsevents/news632497220111761256.htm+%22richard+goldstone%22+oil+for+food&hl=en
This whole thing is strange. I dont trust Lanny, I used to trust Paul.
And we all 'know' Kofi is a crook.
Very rare is it that I dont have a strong *working theory*
What do you think Howlin?
Exactly!
This whole Parton/Volcker is about Bolton.
I think Bush said, "You want to mess with Bolton? Okay. Have some of this."
Like I said, ask yourself who has the most to gain from diminishing Volker and his investigation, because that is all we are accomplishing. Nothing will happen to Kofi if the Congress declares that he knew about the scam (which is actually a given). Volker claims that their is not direct evidence of this, only insinuations. The end result will be that no one will want to cooperate with the investigation because their confidentiality may be compromised and the investigation has been shown to be worthless. May as well close up shop and go home.
Just in time for May Sweeps!
I don't see those dots getting connected as of yet....but it is all very important!
I'm floudering around right with you; I couldn't make a list of the people I trust or believe anymore.
All of this 5hit is the reason the UN was against the war in Iraq. They KNEW what would come out in the wash and all those with dirty hands.
Well you are know fun! Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree.
I cant EVER remember a time when neither of us had strong working theory. You always sharpen my thinking.
Edit:
Well you are no fun! Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree.
I cant EVER remember a time when neither of us had strong working theory. You always sharpen my thinking.
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