Free Republic

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Oil companies, including one that employed an Iraq weapons supplier, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein during the U.N. oil-for-food program, a U.N. report said on Thursday. Saddam Hussein's government took in $228.8 million (128.3 million pounds) from surcharges in connection with oil contracts, the report said. That was nearly 13 percent of the $1.8 billion in surcharges Iraq received from more than 2,200 foreign companies during the oil-for-food humanitarian program of 1996 to 2003, the report charged. Intricate webs of companies, individuals, and governments stretching from Europe to Asia...

Scott Ritter, formerly the top United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, has long argued that claims that Saddam Hussein possessed biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes were massively exaggerated. His public campaign against the US-led invasion of Iraq made him a hated figure of the American right, which still demonises him as an apologist for the ousted Baghdad regime. Now, at the very moment when the absence of weapons of mass destruction in post-Saddam Iraq should make Mr Ritter feel vindicated, he faces new questions about his relationship with Baghdad after he quit his UN job in 1998. Mr Ritter...