Report claims blind eye was turned to sanctions busting by American firms

Julian Borger and Jamie Wilson in Washington
Tuesday May 17, 2005
The Guardian

The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.

Iraq: the real sanctions scandal

The recent interim report by the independent commission investigating the United Nations oil-for-food programme accuses UN officials of favouritism, violation of competitive bidding rules, and a dangerous lack of auditing. But the truth may be far more complicated.

By Joy Gordon
Le Monde diplomatique

ANOTHER Iraq scandal emerged last spring, quite different from the Abu Ghraib prison torture allegations, complete with photographs, that were then embarrassing the Bush adminstration in the United States. The Iraqi newspaper Al Mada focused attention on charges that the United Nations-run oil-for-food programme had been corrupt. In April the US general accounting office published a report claiming that Saddam Hussein had accumulated over $10bn in funds from illicit oil sales and kickbacks on import contracts (1). Later a 900-page CIA report found there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but noted that the Iraqi government had none the less engaged in smuggling and fraud to raise money for weapons of mass destruction.

The rightwing press in the US has been eager to follow up on the accusations, and histrionically. William Safire proclaimed it “the worst financial scandal in human history” (2), although the recent Enron company scandal involving Kenneth Lay, a long-time friend of President George Bush, resulted in similar losses, including billions of dollars of employee pension funds. Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal described the UN programme as marked by “privilege and secrecy”, suggesting this put the UN in the same category as dictatorships (3). Congressman Christopher Shays, who presided over two of the nine congressional hearings that investigated the accusations, claimed that the programme had “trust[ed] Saddam Hussein to exercise sovereign control over billions of dollars of oil sales and commodity purchases” (4).

The Facts Behind the Volcker Commission’s Interim Report

By Joy Gordon

No 5. February 2005
UNA-USA Policy Brief

Introduction

The media and the critics of the United Nations have made much of the interim report of the Independent Inquiry Committee’s (the “Volcker Commission”) finding that the UN’s Oil-for-Food Programme was “tainted,” going as far as to conclude that the program as a whole—and perhaps the UN itself—is corrupt. In fact, the Commission’s findings are much more limited than that. The interim report does not have much to say about the “big ticket” accusations: that Saddam Hussein was able to get $10 billion (or $21 billion, depending on whose numbers you look at) through illicit means. It does say one thing very clearly about the multi-billion dollar accusations: that they largely have nothing to do with the UN or the Oil-for-Food Programme at all.

Where has Iraq’s money gone?

By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 8th February 2005

The Republican lawmakers who have devoted their careers to mauling the UN are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman’s mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the United Nations is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organisation. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN’s oil-for-food programme, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else.

By Claudio Gatti in New York
Financial Times
Published: January 13 2005

For months, the US Congress has been investigating activities that violated the United Nations oil-for-food programme and helped Saddam Hussein build secret funds to acquire arms and buy influence.

President George W. Bush has linked future US funding of the international body to a clear account of what went on under the multi-billion dollar programme.

But a joint investigation by the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily, shows that the single largest and boldest smuggling operation in the oil-for-food programme was conducted with the knowledge of the US government.

“Although the financial beneficiaries were Iraqis and Jordanians, the fact remains that the US government participated in a major conspiracy that violated sanctions and enriched Saddam’s cronies,” a former UN official said. “That is exactly what many in the US are now accusing other countries of having done. I think it’s pretty ironic.”