Posted on 11/16/2005 5:29:59 PM PST by NormsRevenge
UNITED NATIONS - The United States urged the U.N. Wednesday to prevent any destruction of documents collected during the investigation that found massive corruption in its Iraq oil-for-food program.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton asked Secretary-General Kofi Annan to direct the Independent Inquiry Committee, which just completed its yearlong probe of the $64 billion program, "to preserve the integrity of the files" so law enforcement officials can pursue criminal cases against companies and individuals named in the report.
The United States is very concerned that if documents are returned to the countries that provided them, they could disappear, complicating prosecutions, he said.
In a letter to the secretary-general, Bolton requested that Anan work with the Security Council and Iraq on the possibility of using oil-for-food money to keep the committee operating "for the limited purpose of maintaining the integrity and accessibility of the records."
"The purpose of our letter is to underscore the importance of not distributing the documents back to their original sources," Bolton said in an interview. "If we can keep the documents together, it's a real basis for further investigation. We don't want to see these documents going into paper shredders around the world."
Bolton's letter was released just after the Inquiry Committee, which is led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, said it was extending its operations from Nov. 30 to Dec. 31 to help law enforcement authorities and regulatory agencies pursue corruption cases against individuals and companies.
A statement from the committee, known as the IIC, said all material will remain under its control, and it is "making arrangements with the United Nations for the appropriate and orderly availability and disposition of committee materials following the year end."
U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said the U.N. legal department, the Volcker committee, and Iraqi authorities are continuing discussions on the future of the documentation.
In its scathing final report, the IIC named more than 2,200 companies accused of colluding with Saddam Hussein's regime to bilk the oil-for-food program of $1.8 billion. It blamed shoddy U.N. management and the world's most powerful nations for allowing the corruption to go on for years.
The program aimed at easing Iraqi suffering under U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the Oct. 27 report rattled reputations around the world, alleging that Saddam corrupted the program by awarding contracts for oil and humanitarian goods to favored buyers and getting kickbacks from them.
The global scam allegedly involved such name-brand companies as DaimlerChrysler and Siemens AG, as well as a former French U.N. ambassador and a firebrand British politician.
What happens to the millions of pages of documents and interviews with witnesses on which the IIC based its five reports has become an issue because of the sensitive nature of the material.
IIC investigators obtained many documents from the Iraqi government and signed confidentiality agreements with some witnesses and governments. Annan ordered all U.N. staffers to cooperate with the inquiry, but some of their statements may also contain sensitive information, or material that could hurt their careers.
Bolton said confidentiality arrangements should be honored, but he said other documents were provided without restrictions.
"The United States believes that keeping all of the documents in one location with limited, trained staff available to locate them will allow member states easy access to unrestricted records and will more easily permit member states to request the appropriate waivers with respect to restricted-access documents," he said in the letter.
The United States, he added, will consider requests for its confidentiality arrangements to be waived on a case-by-case basis.
Half a dozen U.S. Congressional committees are still investigating the oil-for-food program, as are authorities in Switzerland, Australia and France.
Bolton said all countries whose companies and individuals are named in the report should follow up with their own investigations.
AP?!?
Amazing.
Kofi's crooked, but not stupid. Those papers are probably being shredded at this very minute.
Kofi will soon be calling on Bill and Hill asking to borrow their industrial-sized shredders.
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