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.

By Chuck Quilty

“Few of us,” wrote the playwright, Arthur Miller, “can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”

The United States is attempting to scapegoat the United Nations for alleged irregularities in the Oil-for-Food program which allowed Saddam Hussein to skirt the sanctions against Iraq and accumulate 1.74 billion in illicit funds according to Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group formed after the invasion to find Iraq’s WMD. The 1.74 billion figure cited by Duelfer is considerably less than the 10.1 billion estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office of the 21 billion estimated in a Senate subcommittee report. The current accusations raised by Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) against the U.N. are hypocritical and cynical beyond belief. They are a disgusting attempt to hide the Bush administration’s failed Iraq policy and the death and suffering it has caused.

Bert Sacks has written an article about the corporate media’s “serious, non-benign fantasy” that is being portrayed to the public concerning the Oil-for-Food program and sanctions.

by Bert Sacks — December 2, 2004

The movie Polar Express takes viewers on a fantasy trip to the North Pole. The computer-generated virtual reality that the movie creates is amazing. I saw it Thanksgiving evening.

The next day a friend recorded a 2-minute segment on Fox News Channel about the “scandal” of the U.N.’s oil-for-food program. In its way, it too was an amazing fantasy trip into a virtual reality.

The finale of Polar Express is reaching the North Pole to meet Santa. Santa is important because he has a fantastic bag of toys. But Polar Express is pretty benign compared to the fantasy of Fox.

Fox News Channel’s report on the “scandal” of the oil-for-food program concludes that it was the willingness of critics of the US/UN economic sanctions program “before all the facts were in, that partially enabled Saddam Hussein to get away with killing so many of his own people.” This is serious, non-benign fantasy.

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 16 (IPS) The United States, which has accused the United Nations of condoning bribery and corruption in the now defunct oil-for-food programme in Iraq, has not itself been ethical, says a former senior U.N. official who once headed the humanitarian project in Baghdad.

“Every contract, kickback and every (barrel of oil) smuggled into Turkey, Syria and Jordan, and even into Iran, was well known to and closely monitored by (overhead) U.S. satellites,” says former Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq in 1997-1998.

Besides, he added, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, who was a U.S. and UK ally, made millions of dollars from illegal shipments of oil and gas into Turkey, together with the supplier in Baghdad — (former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s son) Udhay Hussein.

“U.S. oil companies, which indirectly bought some 40 percent of Iraqi oil through the oil-for-food programme, paid the kickbacks (indirectly),” Halliday told IPS.

On 7 April, the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held hearings on “A Review of the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program” (OFF). (1) The context was alleged OFF-related corruption. Among the witnesses was US Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador John Negroponte. Below is selective analysis, and later urls and select excerpts. Negroponte’s statements should be placed in the context of US/UK officials in the post-invasion period aggressively distorting the history of economic sanctions (hereafter “sanctions”) on Iraq. This history included the US/UK role in maintaining sanctions in the face of the credibly, overwhelmingly documented primary role that sanctions had played in Iraq’s humanitarian crisis.