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Smoking Gun against the U.N.


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While the United Nations focused on delivering humanitarian goods to an Iraqi population suffering from international sanctions and the totalitarian regime, Saddam's government devised elaborate ways to skim money from deals sending oil out and goods in. The report spells out how kickbacks were solicited and how money got to Baghdad.

Iraq tried to manipulate foreign governments, including members of the U.N. Security Council (search) by awarding contracts -- and bribes -- to foreign companies and political figures in countries who showed support for ending sanctions, in particular Russia, France and China, the report says...............................

One of the most prolific purchasers of the oil was Swiss-based Glencore run by one-time fugitive American financier Marc Rich, which the report alleges paid over $3.2 million in kickbacks to the Iraqi government. Rich, formerly wanted for tax-evasion was pardoned by President Clinton in his last days in office.

Hmmm, these same countries who opposed the Iraq action. Regarding Clinton, it figures.

Kerry is sounding more pathetic than ever concerning Iraq.

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First off his debate stance was to wait and give more time for the the U.N. sanctions to work which they were clearly not. Secondly, he would have gotten more countries on board (I.E. Germany, France, Russia etc..) which he would not have even if he turned blue in face with the above evidence. These countries were subverting the U.N. process and taking it to the bank as well. As I have stated before, these countries had too much of a good thing going to join and help the U.S. take down saddam. Also, it takes a fire cracker under american butts to get us to do anything sometimes. Sure saddam may not have been a global threat yet at the time of the war but he would have been soon and I mean very soon. Bush needed to do what needed to be done now not tomorrow in a month or years but now. That much I give him credit for.

Kerry use to spout the same thing about Saddam and Iraq until it became politicaly advantageous to say otherwise.

The rest I'll leave for your own research.

[ 10-08-2004, 01:09 AM: Message edited by: LostInSpace ]

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LIS, I've heard that the US was also participating in the scandal, though I haven't had time to research it myself.

There is also evidence that the sanctions did indeed cripple his weapons building plans etc... Hence the report released the other day that pointed out he had no WMD's and only had plans to reconstitute them once the sanctions were lifted.

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I'm still waiting for the rest of the media to cover this issue with the same gusto they have in focusing in on WMD. Still nothing, this is the best CNN has done in this matter Cheney uses WMD report to defend Iraq war. Yep that's it folks no indept reporting like the fox article going on point for point with specifics.

quote:

Originally posted by Grizzle:

and only had plans to reconstitute them once the sanctions were lifted.

And you don't think that Saddam would have been a threat that we would have had to deal in the near future anyway? Well the way I look at it take him out now before he has enough WMD to cause massive amounts of casualties. If you think the casuality count is high now, can you imagine what the count would be like if we needed to take him out in the near future and he had many WMD's to use effectively against any invading troops.

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Steyn online

quote:

THE U.N. NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED

Don't take the word of your lazy rolling-news update anchor or the AP rewrite guy on the Duelfer findings on Iraq. Instead, read the report for yourself. It is an amazing document. It renders John Kerry, on foreign policy and national security, either a complacent fool or an utter fraud. It's not about WMD, it's about the top-to-toe corruption of the entire international system by Saddam Hussein. The "global test" is a racket, and anybody who puts faith in it is jeopardizing America's national security. If the lazy US media won't pick up this story now, shame on them. Here's what I wrote six months ago, in The Sunday Telegraph of April 25th:

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking.

No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organisation's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya, nor the UN cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa, nor UN complicity in massacres, but some misty Unesco cultural event compered by the late Sir Peter Ustinov featuring photogenic children of many lands.

So the question now is whether the UN Oil-for-Food programme is just another of those things that slip down the memory hole, and we all go back to parroting the lullaby that "only the UN can bring legitimacy to Iraq/Afghanistan/Your Basket Case Here". Legitimacy seems to be the one thing the UN doesn't bring, and I'm not just talking about the love-children of UN-enriched Balkan hookers in Kosovo.

The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan's Secretariat.

In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody's guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN's own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.

Where did all the other billions go? According to Kofi Annan himself, some $31 billion went on other "humanitarian" spending for Iraq. Such as? Well, in 2002, the Secretary-General expanded the programme to cover other "humanitarian" categories such as "sport", "information", "justice" and "labour and social affairs".

In Iraq, "sport" meant Uday's rape rooms, and "justice" meant a mass grave out in the desert, but that's not to say there weren't attendant expenses involved. So Kofi himself directly approved such "humanitarian" items as $20 million for an "Olympic sport city" (state-of-the-art rape rooms) and $50 million for Iraq's Ministry of Information (Comical Ali's office).

As the US Defence Contract Management Agency's report put it after the liberation, "Some items of questionable utility for the Iraqi people (eg, Mercedes-Benz touring sedans) were identified". The Jordanian supplier of school furniture had to be let go on the grounds that he didn't exist.

At the UN they were taken aback by this impertinent auditing by US government agencies. At Enron, you have to run the books past Arthur Andersen. But at UNron you don't need to hire even a ledger clerk. That total of $46 billion - 15 for food, 31 for Ba'ath Party interior decorating - is Kofi's best guess, and he expects us to take his word for it.

True, he approved some scrutiny. All Oil-for-Food shipments into Iraq had to be inspected - initially by Lloyd's Register of London, but in 1998 they were let go and replaced by a Swiss company, who had on the payroll a consultant by the name of Kojo Annan, son of Kofi. Hmm.

So far all this is just UN business as usual - venal and wasteful, albeit on a larger scale than ever before. But even by their own revolting standards the UN crossed a line.

A programme created to allow the world to constrain Saddam appears to have become instead the means by which Saddam constrained the world. Oil-for-Food gave him a free hand to reward well-connected French and Russian suppliers. He ran the programme by selling cut-price vouchers for Iraqi oil to politicians and bureaucrats, which they could then offload on the world markets at the going rate.

Among the alleged beneficiaries were senior French politicians and Russia's "office of the President". According to documentation found in the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, recipients of Saddam's generosity included the man Annan picked to run Oil-for-Food, the UN under-secretary-general Benon Sevan, who got enough oil to make himself a nice illegal profit of $3.5 million.

In other words, Oil-for-Fraud is everything the Left said the war was: it was all about oil - for Benon Sevan, the UN, France, Russia and the others who had every incentive to maintain Saddam in power. Every Halliburton invoice to the Pentagon is audited to the last penny, but Saddam can use Kofi Annan's office as a front for a multi-billion dollar global kickback scheme and, until it was brought to public attention by the tireless Claudia Rosett of The Wall Street Journal and a few other persistent types, the Secretary-General apparently never noticed.

Mr Sevan has now returned to New York from Australia. The lethargic Aussie press had made little effort to run him to ground because the notion that lifelong UN bureaucrats could be at the centre of a web of massive fraud at the expense of starving Iraqi urchins is just too, too "unthinkable" for much of the media.

So the conventional wisdom stays conventional - that we need to get the UN back into Iraq. No we don't. Iraq deserves better than an organisation which spent the last six years as Saddam's collaborator. As Claudia Rosett put it, "We are left to contemplate a UN system that has engendered a Secretary-General either so dishonest that he should be dismissed or so incompetent that he is truly dangerous and should be dismissed."

He should be, but he almost certainly won't be. After all, it's hardly his fault. When he set up the show, who'd have thought that one day there would be US auditors in Baghdad? Why, it was, as Polly Toynbee would say, "unthinkable".


No, the US has auditors going over the UN oil for food, and the UN is NOT happy about it.

The UN is corrupt from the top to bottom, they need to be kicked out and sent off to the Hague where they belong, and the UN headquarters building turned into low income housing.

At least then it would actually be helping people.

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quote:

Originally posted by Jaguar:

No, the US has auditors going over the UN oil for food, and the UN is NOT happy about it.

The UN is corrupt from the top to bottom, they need to be kicked out and sent off to the Hague where they belong, and the UN headquarters building turned into low income housing.

At least then it would actually be helping people.

Thanks Jag for that article.

People keep saying sanctions work well then what's the story with Cuba? How long has the sanctions been against that country? Yet, Fidel Castro keeps thumbing his nose at everyone. Yep sanctions work (cough). Scantions may look good on paper and ease people's fears but that's all.

As for the U.N. building turned into low income housing. That's on the east side and on the water front it's prime real estate and would be turned into a Trump Luxury Complex. I think I would rather see a nice casino there instead this city could use the income that would generate.

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quote:

Originally posted by LostInSpace:

I'm still waiting for the rest of the media to cover this issue with the same gusto they have in focusing in on WMD. Still nothing, this is the best CNN has done in this matter
. Yep that's it folks no indept reporting like the fox article going on point for point with specifics.

quote:

Originally posted by Grizzle:

and only had plans to reconstitute them once the sanctions were lifted.

And you don't think that Saddam would have been a threat that we would have had to deal in the near future anyway? Well the way I look at it take him out now before he has enough WMD to cause massive amounts of casualties. If you think the casuality count is high now, can you imagine what the count would be like if we needed to take him out in the near future and he had many WMD's to use effectively against any invading troops.


The answer was simple, continue with sanctions and weapons inspections until Saddam died of old age or the populace rebelled on their own. We could have worked to breed democracy from within rather than take the strong arm approach and attempt to force it upon them.

Besides, going back to the original justification given to the US people, Saddam was a near term, immminent threat and we couldn't risk his weapons falling into the wrong hands. Oops.

As for the UN, despite it's problems, some sort of international organization is needed as the world grows smaller every day. There is no way the human race can survive if all nations aren't capable of finding some common ground to engage in ideas and diplomacy. Safety in numbers as they say, two heads are better than one.

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Continue with sanctions until he died and let his sons crazy and crazier take over?

Yeah right Grizzle.

Dreamland Grizzle, Dreamland.

The only way to make sure that Saddam and his crazy sons did not stay in power was to remove them.

READ THE DUEFLER report, READ IT!!!

You haven't and it's obvious, you are expecting the media to tell you the truth that's in it, and they are NOT....

And as far as the UN is concerned, they made 17 resolutions against Iraq, and we are finding labs, and WMD's, precursor chemicals etc, ALL of them should have been DESTROYED, but weren't.

12 years of resolution, yeah, the UN works, NOT!!

THere is still MASSICE killing going on in the Sudan, the UN has condemned it, but that hasn't stopped it.

THe UN is a fricking joke, it is diseased from it's head to it's toes. It needs to be destroyed and a new organization with some teeth needs to replace it.

Only Democracies need apply.

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No I haven't read the report Jaguar, but I intend to this weekend. I want to read the whole thing and it's going to take a large investment of time.

Regardless of Saddam and his sons, democracy cannot be imposed, it's an inherent contradiction.

So you hate the UN, we get that. Do you believe there needs to be some sort of multi-national organization?

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quote:

Originally posted by Grizzle:

No I haven't read the report Jaguar, but I intend to this weekend. I want to read the whole thing and it's going to take a large investment of time.

Regardless of Saddam and his sons, democracy cannot be imposed, it's an inherent contradiction.

So you hate the UN, we get that. Do you believe there needs to be some sort of multi-national organization?

Well regardless of your feelings about it, Democracy can be imposed, because the people want it, they just did not have the strength to fight Saddam and his thugs in order to get it.

They needed us for that, and they are now taking it by themselves and running with it.

There should be a multinational organization, but one that is for Democracies ONLY, dictators and others need not apply. The countries that would join this organization would have to have strong militaries and be willing to use them to put the organizations policies into effect.

In other words, the people that are the teeth of the UN, the US, Great Britain, Australia, Poland, etc.

No whimps and empty suits needed NOR wanted.

Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iran etc would NOT be members until they had had MAJOR regime change and have democracy established.

France, Germany, and Canada, and a few others could join, but they would have little if no power, if they are UNWILLING to back up thier words with actions, then they deserve to sit on the bench without input.

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We know that distortions abounded in the Vice President's contribution to the Cheney-Edwards debate on Tuesday. But one moment that hasn't received much attention is Dick Cheney's revealing misuse of the 1980s civil war in El Salvador. Observers of Latin American affairs were shocked and awed when the Vice President cited the conflict as a parallel for the current predicament in Afghanistan:

"Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador," Cheney said. "We had a guerilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead. And we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress... And as the terrorists would come in and shoot up polling places as soon as they left, the voters would come back and get in line and would not be denied their right to vote. And today El Salvador is a [whole] of a lot better because we held free elections... And [that concept] will apply in Afghanistan. And it will apply as well in Iraq."

The most relevant fact that the Vice President omits here is that the 75,000 people were killed not by the guerillas, but by the government that Cheney was supporting and its paramilitary death squads. The second most relevant fact is that the 1984 elections were widely recognized as a farce, with a long line of genuine opposition candidates already having been killed off and with the U.S. spending $10 million to manipulate the outcome. That this is the model for exporting democracy says a lot about what the neoconservatives have in store for us.

In truth, if El Salvador is a whole of a lot better off today, it is because the movement against the government continued. A UN Truth Commission, mandated as part of the country's 1992 peace accords, affirmed a reality that the Reaganites steadfastly denied then and prefer to forget today. The Commission found the FMLN guerillas responsible for 5% of human rights violations and the Armed Forces responsible for 90%, with the remaining 5% undetermined.

The New York Times commented upon the release of the report:

"A United Nations Truth Commission now confirms what the Reagan Administration sought to cloud--that terrible crimes were perpetrated in freedom's name by the armed forces of El Salvador. ... The report identifies a former Defense Minister as one of the senior officers who ordered the killing of six Jesuit priests in 1989. It names another Defense Minister as among those who tried to cover up the murder of four American churchwomen. It finds that Roberto D'Aubuisson, the right-wing politician and hero to Senator Jesse Helms, ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero."

The Times' columnist Anthony Lewis concluded: "[T]he United States spent $6 billion supporting a Salvadoran Government that was dominated by killers. We armed them, trained their soldiers and covered up their crimes." The landmark report of the UN Commission is available on-line at: While John Kerry is complicit in the invasion of Iraq, he made some important stands in the 1980s denouncing U.S. sponsorship of human rights abuses in both El Salvador and Nicaragua. The right wing's continuing anger at these stances makes for interesting reading, as it mimics Cheney in drawing exactly the wrong lessons from Central American history.

A prime example: Hugh Hewitt's recent defense of the bloody, illegal Contra War in The Weekly Standard . Hewitt claims that Senators Kerry and Harken, by visiting Nicaragua in 1985, were "appeasing" Sandinista Daniel Ortega, whom he calls one of "America's enemies." The quotes from the time that Hewitt uses to evidence this supposedly damning charge in fact show someone with a considerably more lucid view of the region's politics than those in power, then or now:

"If you look back at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution," Kerry said, "if you look back at the troops that were in Cambodia, the history of the body count, and the misinterpretation of the history of Vietnam itself, and look at how we are interpreting the struggle in Central America and examine the CIA involvement, the mining of the harbors, the effort to fund the Contras, there is a direct and unavoidable parallel between these two periods of our history." Even as the neocons continue to warp their meaning, the parallels continue. With Cheney holding up as exemplary the record of U.S. intervention in Central America, we can be sure that "crimes in freedom's name" is a concept that will apply well into the future.

-- Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City,

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Our present Administratiion, has not even offered ANY counter or administration of LAW, toward the presence of alqueda, or any other threat within our own territories, yet they wish to tell the whole world: what they are to do, and what they cannot do, in relation to "implimentation of law", outside their juristiction.

This whole situation, is incomprehensible, and utterly unacceptable, to MANY, within this country.

Frankly, I am amazed the whole issue of violence and lack of cohesive effort to contain such, within the present TERRITORIES of the UNITED STATES, has not been presented by the Democratic Party. I feel, they are so overwhelmed with REASON, to dethrone Bush, they are avoiding undue confusion, as to the primary inadequacy of the "SHRUB" administration and it's efforts.

Besides, neither party, wishes to devalue any present U.S. doctrine of influence, which remains

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Tensions surged in the capital, where two weeks of shootouts and beheadings have killed at least 48 people.

Former Haitian soldiers, who hold sway over much of the countryside, are threatening to deploy into Port-au-Prince over the objections of the interim government, which is backed by an overextended and beleaguered U.N. peacekeeping force.

Hmmm, more U.N. bungling. Common U.N. get more countries on board to help out.

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UN stands for United Nitwits?

It's just another money making tool for the global neocons, controlled by the PNAC.

I like their veiled forte`;

"You're either with us or you're dead."

What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall at every meeting of the PNAC,The CFR and the Trilateral Commission.

Simply put, it's all manipulation for profit. Every conflict that is currently happening across the globe has been planned and orchestrated to occur for the sole purpose of profiteering with every resource the planet has to offer.

The law grinds the poor and the rich control the law.

Who's next for the grinder?

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Guest Shingen

quote:

Originally posted by Wolferz:

What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall at every meeting of the PNAC,The CFR and the Trilateral Commission.

Simply put, it's all manipulation for profit. Every conflict that is currently happening across the globe has been planned and orchestrated to occur for the sole purpose of profiteering with every resource the planet has to offer.

The law grinds the poor and the rich control the law.

Who's next for the grinder?

Why do you think that there is only a two party dominance in our "political" system? The powermongers choose the canidates for both parties, give the American people the illusion of free elections, and control the White House every four years, no matter who is elected.

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  • 2 months later...

(CNN) -- Dogged by allegations that he pocketed oil money from Saddam Hussein's government, Benon Sevan, the former head of the United Nations oil-for-food program, insisted this week that he had done nothing wrong.

--------------------------------------------------

Annan's son also eyed in probe

Kojo Annan, the son of the U.N. secretary-general, has been the subject of accusations of wrongdoing in connection to the program. He says he had no involvement. (Full story)

Annan, 31, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, once worked for Cotecna, a Switzerland-based company hired by the United Nations in 1998 to verify paperwork on imports bought by Iraq.

Critics have suggested the firm might have been favored in its U.N. bid because of the Annan family connection. Annan and Cotecna deny that. No formal charges of wrongdoing have been made against Kojo Annan.

A group of U.S. Republican legislators has urged Kofi Annan to quit his U.N. post, but the Bush administration has expressed support in his leadership of the 191-nation body.

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