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Last week certainly was instructive about the epic... United Nations Oil for Food program. First came Monday's hearings in Norm Coleman's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations where we learned that Saddam Hussein gamed the program for twice as much unmonitored revenue as previously thought -- $21.3 billion, up from $10 billion. Also fascinating was chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer's testimony that he believes, based on what high-level Iraqi sources have told him, that U.N. Oil for Food director Benon Sevan did in fact profit from Iraqi oil vouchers. Mr. Sevan continues to deny the allegation. Then on Wednesday Henry Hyde's House...

NEW YORK (AP) - Saddam Hussein diverted money from the U.N. oil-for-food program to pay millions of dollars to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who carried out attacks on Israel, say congressional investigators who uncovered evidence of the money trail. The former Iraqi president tapped secret bank accounts in Jordan - where he collected bribes from foreign companies and individuals doing illicit business under the humanitarian program - to reward the families up to $25,000 each, investigators told The Associated Press. Documents prepared for a Wednesday hearing by the House International Relations Committee outline the new findings about how Saddam...

C-Span now showing the Oil For Food Scandal with Congress members.

...Iraq's top customer was Russia, whose firms bought $19.2 billion worth of Iraq oil and exported $3.3 billion in humanitarian goods. Fellow Security Council member France was a distant but significant second, at $4.4 billion and $2.9 billion respectively. China is also high on the list. Oil voucher recipients are alleged to include the Russian presidential office, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, and even former Oil for Food program director Benon Sevan of the U.N.... Against this backdrop, it is impossible to take Secretary-General Annan seriously when he calls it "inconceivable" that this could have affected the Security Council's...

This report relays the findings of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. We are aware that the files comprising this 1,000-page report are extremely large and, in practice, available only to visitors who have a broadband connection to our site. Thus, we extracted the key findings from each of the major sections of the report and provide them as a separate, much smaller file. All of the files linked below are in PDF format and require Adobe's free Acrobat® Reader™ to view. We plan to post an HTML version of the...

October 27, 2004 Edition > Section: Foreign Printer-friendly version Email this article Urgent Warning on Iraqi Cache Issued in 1995 BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun October 27, 2004 WASHINGTON - Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq's interim government said this month was looted due to poor security. The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the...

Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq's interim government said this month was looted due to poor security. The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations' atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing. Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced...

I found the entire testimony from the day he released the FINAL ISG report on Iraq's WMD. I cut it down so people could see the more important and unique facets of their conversations in the Senate. Interesting. Someone might wanna forward this to the Kerry Campaign so they realize that: sanctions never would have worked inspections never would have worked diplomacy had been bought by Saddam and never would have worked and that the "allies" JFK raves about were never gonna come and send their sons to die in "the wrong war" so that American troops could cut and...

PARIS (Reuters) - Paris will deliver confidential documents to U.N. investigators to refute charges in a report published on a CIA (news - web sites) Web site that French firms abused the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq (news - web sites), officials said on Monday. The report by a former U.N. weapons inspector implicated leading French companies and politicians in a strategy by Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to bribe his way clear of U.N. sanctions. Officials said Paris protested in vain to Washington over the Oct. 7 report by Charles Duelfer, whose CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) found...

(AP) - Arms hunter Charles Duelfer's report, in concluding Iraq might have resumed weapons-building "after sanctions were removed," left out the crucial fact that the U.N. Security Council had planned controls over Baghdad for years to come, U.N. officials say. The council, led by the United States, had decreed that inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring. "It's been a little disturbing," said Demetrius Perricos, chief U.N. weapons inspector. "All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so." In...

NEW YORK (AP) - Interviews with dozens of former and current Iraqi officials by congressional investigators have produced new evidence that Saddam Hussein micro-managed business deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program to maximize political influence with important foreign governments like Russia and neighboring Arab states. The Iraqi officials, who were flown outside of Iraq for their own safety during the interviews, provided a list of foreign companies favored by Saddam and his top lieutenants for import contracts under the U.N. program. They also revealed a parallel blacklist of companies that the then-Iraq leader disqualified from getting deals, investigators told The...

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s latest interview with British television, in which he dismissed the serious allegations of Oil-for-Food improprieties raised in the Duelfer Report, undermines his credibility and impartiality with regard to the Oil-for-Food investigation. [1] Moreover, Annan’s remarks reinforce concerns over his own failure of leadership relating to the U.N.’s administration of the Oil-for-Food program and cast serious doubt over his suitability to remain in office while the scandal is investigated. In addition, Annan’s controversial statements regarding the Iraq war have further undermined his supposedly neutral position as the world’s most senior servant of the international community. Annan should...

...In Iraq, John Kerry — who used to say that Saddam Hussein posed a genuine threat to America because he surely possessed weapons of mass destruction — would have imposed a "global test" before committing forces to protect U.S. security... [H]e would not be prepared to act until nations like France and Germany gave the go-ahead. Indeed, he stresses the infinite value of conversation — calling for "a summit of all our allies," much as he once begged the first President Bush to send someone to Baghdad in the firm belief that Saddam Hussein could be talked out of Kuwait....

...[Kerry] and other nouveau antiwarriors... have quickly seized on the conclusion that there are no WMDs in Iraq from the 1,000-page postmortem completed last month for the CIA by Charles Duelfer.... [W]hile Saddam was playing hide-and-seek with the U.N. over whether he had WMDs, his stealthy little spooks were focusing their efforts on weapons specifically designed for use by terrorists. Could it thus be said that Saddam was himself plotting foreign terrorism? Or at least that his secret service had something going along those lines while he was busy corrupting the U.N. oil-for-food program and bribing French and Russian politicians...

The big news is that the U.N. has flunked "the global test." And as big as it is, it's a story that isn't likely to find its way into the newspaper that trumpets "All the news that's fit to print" in the upper left corner of its front page every day. To find that "the global community" is made up of a bunch of crooks, that "the global test" is a racket, and that John Kerry is either utterly naïve or in cahoots with these global con artists is something that's just too unfit to think about, let alone broadcast...

The big news is that the UN has flunked “the global test.” And as big as it is, it’s a story that isn’t likely to find its way into the newspaper that trumpets “All the news that’s fit to print” in the upper left corner of its front page every day. To find that “the global community” is made up of a bunch of crooks, that “the global test” is a racket, and that John Kerry is either utterly naïve or in cahoots with these global con artists is something that's just too unfit to think about, let alone broadcast...

When you read the words "United Nations," what comes into your mind? Perhaps it's an august phrase, such as "international community," or a lofty image, such as the blue U.N. seal. In the first presidential debate, President Bush spoke of "going to the United Nations" as if it were a tiresome relative. ("I didn't need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations. I decided to go there myself.") Sen. John Kerry often talks about the United Nations as if it were a forgotten American ally. Yet the United Nations is not a person, or an ally, or...

Oil-for-Food Scandal Key to CIA Report Monday The U.N. Oil-for-Food program — already the subject of federal, congressional and United Nations financial abuse probes — took a fresh hit with an explosive new report that said Saddam Hussein was using the program to fund his ambitions. The report looking into whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — found that Saddam was able to "subvert" the $60 billion U.N. program to generate an estimated $1.7 billion in revenue outside U.N. control from 1997-2003. In light of the report, FOX News presents another hour-long special investigating the biggest financial scam in...

Saturday, October 16, 2004 GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT INTELLIGENCE BRIEF Duelfer: 'A lot of material left Iraq and went to Syria' Iraq Survey Group head does not rule out Saddam's transfer of WMD -------------------------------------------------- Posted: October 16, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern 2004 WorldNetDaily.com At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Oct. 6, Charles Duelfer, an adviser to the CIA, did not rule out Saddam's transfer of Iraqi missiles and weapons of mass destruction to Syria, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service. Duelfer agreed that a large amount of material had been transferred by Iraq to Syria before the March 2003 war. "A...

Duelfer: 'A lot of material left Iraq and went to Syria' Iraq Survey Group head does not rule out Saddam's transfer of WMD -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: October 16, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: WorldNetDaily brings readers exclusive, up-to-the-minute global intelligence news and analysis from Geostrategy-Direct, a new online newsletter edited by veteran journalist Robert Morton and featuring the "Backgrounder" column compiled by Bill Gertz. Geostrategy-Direct is a subscription-based service produced by the publishers of WorldTribune.com, a free news service frequently linked by the editors of WorldNetDaily. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Oct. 6, Charles...