UN Oil for Palaces Program Still Under Scrutiny

This NY Post article relates that 3000 UN staffers are under investigation for their involvment in the horribly run and scandal plagued UN Oil for Food program.

March 29, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - Investigators probing the United Nations' Iraq oil-for-food program are taking a close look at allegations the scandal-plagued initiative was filled with spies, terrorists and do-nothing bureaucrats earning exorbitant salaries.

And this would be different from any other UN program in what way?

The activities of the estimated 3,000 U.N. staffers who were working on the $100 billion humanitarian aid program are emerging as a central focus of the investigations into the mushrooming scandal.

How can you employ 3000 people to look the other way while keeping their pockets open for bribes? Isn't their some sort of labor management program in place?

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council seeking backing for an independent investigation of the kickback/bribery scandal, said he wants the probe to focus, in part, on whether the U.N. staffers violated procedures established for approving and monitoring contracts and whether U.N. personnel engaged "in any illicit or corrupt activities."

There wouldn't be a "kickback/bribery scandal" if there weren't UN staffers involved in "illicit or corrupt activities", now would there?

So far, the only U.N. figure to be named publicly in the scandal is Benon Sevon, the man in charge of the oil-for-food program.

As people have always said, "The fish rots from the head down." There's no way the head of the program was up to his eyeballs in graft, kickbacks, and corruption without a bunch of his staffers being in on it.

He was on a list of 270 names - published in a Baghdad newspaper - of international politicians and businessmen who were receiving vouchers from Iraq to buy oil at below-market prices so it could be resold at substantial profits.

And a bunch of those names were French ministers, one was a guy who arranged meetings with Jimmy Carter, and another was an Iraqi-American who kicked $400,000 over to Scott Ritter, the kiddy diddler.

Sevon has denied the charge, but has been put on ice - purportedly "on vacation" - until the end of the month, when he is due to retire.

And if you go asking around in a prison you'll find that all the inmates are completely innocent, too.

But new questions have surfaced about the presence on the oil-for-food program's administrative staff of a bureaucrat who was widely known to be an undercover agent for the intelligence service of France, a country that had huge financial interests in the program.

Yet John Kerry thinks we should've secured the blessings of France before pulling the rug out from under France's little kickbacks for mass-genocide operation they had going.

Kurdish officials in northern Iraq also made repeated complaints about the fact that Iraq, with U.N. approval, kept Americans, Britons and Scandinavians off the staff that administered the 13 percent of the oil-for-food proceeds earmarked for Kurdish provinces.

And of course the UN did Saddam's bidding, not wanting to upset a great and mutually beneficial relationship.

Only workers from countries perceived to be friendly to Iraq were approved.

France, Belgium, and Germany, anyone?

Howard Ziad, the Kurdish representative to the United Nations, told The Post that Kurdish authorities made repeated complaints to U.N. higher-ups that the staff assigned to his region was riddled with spies working for Iraqi intelligence.

Or French intelligence, not that there's a difference, given post-war revelations.

In July 2001, Kurdish security forces arrested a Tunisian U.N. employee with a car full of explosives meant for a terror bombing in Erbil. He was held for four months until the United Nations quietly negotiated his release, Ziad said.

When the UN is employing the suicide bombers it's part of the problem, certainly not part of the solution.