Will Tongsun Sing? (Oil For Food)

You're a 71-year-old man with diabetes, hypertension and a kidney transplant. You've been in federal lock-up since you were virtually abducted from a plane in Mexico City on a trip from Canada to Panama in January. Today you are facing up to five years in prison - which could be a life term - after a jury took less than a day to convict. And there's an additional felony charge with another five-year max looming in Washington DC. Do you sing?

It's not too late for Tongsun Park. Although he blew his chance at a plea bargain, he can still trade his secrets about the Oil-For-Food scandal for a lighter sentence. His trial left many unanswered questions: What happened to the $1 million in cash he got from Iraq in 1996 while serving as a conduit to then-UN chief Boutros Boutros Ghali? Who were those unnamed people he had to "take care of"? What did Park tell Maurice Strong, then a top aide to current UN chief Kofi Annan, about the source of his $1 million investment of Iraqi money into a failing company controlled by Strong?

Let's remember: Park has done it before. As the key figure in the "Koreagate" bribery scandal in Washington in the 1970s, he testified to Congress under a grant of immunity that he helped funnel money to US Congressmen with the backing of South Korean intelligence. When the Oil-For-Food scandal broke, Park held conversations with US investigators - before leaving the country with their acquiescence, promising to return. Even after he was charged, he told South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper he was considering a plea bargain. Admitting he received money from Iraq, he said: "I was told the target of US attorneys' investigation was corruption charges against high-ranking UN officials related to the Oil-for-Food programme, not me."

David Kelley, then the chief US federal prosecutor in New York, promised when he first charged Park to "wring the towel dry" of corruption at the UN. His successor, Michael Garcia, has been less uncompromising about his commitment. When I went to see him a couple of months ago, he refused to endorse Kelley's pledge, claiming he could not comment because of an active investigation. But there is still another big Oil-For-Food case on the calendar: Texas oil-baron Oscar Wyatt and fellow oil-man David Chalmers and various associates are scheduled in federal court in Manhattan on November 8. (See Garcia's press release: Download parkconvictionPR.pdf)

Park obviously misread the jury. Halfway through the trial, he told me and other reporters he thought it was "going well". But the jury took a remarkably short time to convict in such a complex case. Park obviously did not notice how the jurors guffawed when Samir Vincent, his accomplice-turned-government witness, recounted how he handed Park $100,000 in cash in a Manhattan coffee shop and left without without paying the bill. "I was hoping he was going to take care of the bill because you have to pay when you leave a restaurant," Vincent dead-panned. The jury lapped it up. Cash hand-offs in a coffee-shop! Here was something any New York juror could understand.

The second factor, of course, was that Vincent, testifying under his own plea deal, kept spectacularly detailed contemporaneous notes of his encounters with Park (many recording purported backchannel communications between Boutros Ghali and Iraq.) Clearly that was good trade-craft for Vincent. It makes one wonder if Park has a similar set of minutes somewhere himself?

Michael Kim, Park's lawyer, concedes Park is "very disappointed" with the guilty verdict. But he holds out hope that Judge Denny Chin will throw out the jury's finding. He plans to file a Motion to Acquit, arguing that the jury lacked evidence on which to convict and that the case was anyway beyond the statute of limitations. A hearing on the motion is due September 22. But it's far from clear that Chin will prove a sympathetic judge. It was Chin, after all, who denied Park bail despite his medical ailments, when the original magistrate had all but promised to free him. Kim seems not to exclude an eventual cooperation deal. "As a matter of law, that is always available," he told me. "But there are no current discussions about that." Sentencing is scheduled for October 26. ENDS

http://newsblaze.com/story/20060806140749tsop.nb/newsblaze/TOPSTORY/Top-Stories.html

The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations

The United Nations, whether we like it or not, remains an institution of unparalleled global influence, and its origins, strengths and weaknesses deserve to be understood.

Helping us do so is the eminently readable narrative by Yale University's Paul Kennedy, "The Parliament of Man." Tracking the internationalist dream from its intellectual infancy, Kennedy presents both the idealism and Realpolitik that led to the U.N.'s founding in 1945, one of several tensions he returns to in assessing the sprawling organization's actions over the six decades that followed.

The British-born historian's thesis is that we must fully address the United Nations' mixed record, and then, ultimately, celebrate the organization for having bestowed "great benefits to our generation." This is a legitimate argument to make. Regrettably, though, it is one the author fails to respect.

While Kennedy does treat U.N. fiascoes in Rwanda and elsewhere, his omission of what are arguably the world body's two greatest contemporary failures is glaring, and belies the book's claim to be an objective assessment.

First, Kennedy devotes all of one sentence to the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program, the graft of which ran into the billions, and, as confirmed by the independent Volcker inquiry, touched U.N. officialdom at the highest levels. Those implicated included Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son, the cousin and brother-in-law of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and even U.N. ambassadors like France's Jean-Bernard Merimee, arrested by his own country for being on Saddam's payroll.

How one can write about the United Nations in 2006 without addressing Oil for Food is a mystery.

Or maybe not. There is something of a tacit agreement among U.N. advocates to ignore the affair, including the recent conviction of Korean Tongsun Park, who in 1997 passed $1 million dollars from Saddam to senior U.N. official Maurice Strong. As it happens, Mr. Strong is mentioned in Kennedy's book-but with praise, for the 1970's environmental efforts of this "earnest Canadian."

Second, Kennedy ignores the devastating damage the United Nations continues to inflict by its obsession with bashing Israel. The issue is material as it dominates many of the U.N.'s annual gatherings-the World Health Organization, the General Assembly-to the exclusion of the world's real problems. Time spent by the supposedly new and improved Human Rights Council denouncing Israel-amounting to 100 percent of the country resolutions passed at its inaugural session last month-is time not spent on Sudan's mass rape and killings in Darfur, Fidel Castro's jailing of journalists in Cuba, and the repression of women in Saudi Arabia.

That Kennedy is virtually blind to this bias is explained not only by his feelings for the United Nations, but also by his apparent approval of its one-sided approach. For Kennedy, Egypt's 1973 Yom Kippur attack on Israel was merely "reckless," while Israel's defense was "vengeful." Similarly, Israel's response to PLO terror from Lebanon was "brutal" and "illegal."

Unfortunately, while Kennedy does address U.N. flaws, some are simply too ugly for him to expose, however cancerous they remain to the organization.

So long as the United Nations continues down this tortuous path, Americans will rightly question its relevance-and not only as a neutral peacekeeper in southern Lebanon.

Source: United Nations

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