[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Several American companies on the list, compiled from 13 documents kept by Hussein’s vice president and oil minister, were given vouchers to purchase billions of dollars of oil at discounted prices. The U.S. companies are not named in the report because of privacy laws, U.S. officials said.[/quote]
Gee, no idea who those would be. But it couldn’t possibly be any company owned or operated in whole or part by HAL, could it? They always play by the rules.
BB,
John Kerry was right on!!! Another round of deliberations in the U.N. would have solved everything.
What a joke.
The most anti-war countries, were also the most bribed.
Coincidence?
Nope.
JeffR
Claudia Rossett weighs in on the new evidence indicting the UN’s big scam, also known as “Oil for Food”:
October 07, 2004, 10:50 p.m.
Saddam?s Sugar Daddy
The facts about the U.N.?s corrupt Oil-for-Food relationship with the deposed Iraqi tyrant are further exposed.
CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer may not have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he sure found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.
As Duelfer documents, Oil-for-Food allowed Saddam to replenish his empty coffers, firm up his networks for hiding money and buying arms, corrupt the U.N.'s own debates over Iraq, greatly erode sanctions and deliberately prep the ground for further rearming, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons. As set up and run by the U.N., Oil-for-Food devolved into a depraved and increasingly dangerous mockery of what was advertised by the U.N. as a relief program for sick and starving Iraqis.
The report notes that the start of Oil-for-Food, in 1996, marked the revival of Saddam’s post-Gulf War fortunes. His regime amassed some $11 billion in illicit funds between the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and his overthrow by the U.S.-led Coalition in 2003. Most of that money flowed in from 1996-2003, during the era of Oil-for-Food. One might add that what allowed this dirty money to stack up was U.N. policy ? urged along and overseen by Annan, in the name of aid ? that allowed Saddam to import the equipment to revive Iraq’s oil production, all of it accruing to Saddam. Saddam’s regime had virtually no other source of income; there was no tax base. It was out of these oil flows, condoned (but not well metered) by the U.N., that Saddam derived virtually all income for the astounding roster of political bribery and illicit arms transactions detailed in this report.
Saddam followed a deliberate strategy of using bribes in such forms as contracts for cheap oil via the U.N. program, or outright gifts of vouchers for oil pumped under U.N. supervision, to gain political influence abroad. He grossly violated U.N. rules, with illicit trade agreements, oil smuggling, and arms deals (conventional, but still deadly) ? and the U.N. did not stop him. By 2001, Saddam was able to thwart many of the constraints sanctions were meant to impose on his regime. His strategy, notes the Duelfer report, succeeded “to the point where sitting members of the Security Council were actively violating resolutions passed by the Security Council.”
But no one has ever heard these facts from the U.N. itself, certainly not from such prime violators as France, Russia, and Syria ? nor from the man most directly responsible for protecting the honor of the institution, Secretary-General Annan. Instead, Annan has to this day refused even to disclose to the public such basic details as the names of Saddam’s contractors or the terms of their deals.
By greatly obscuring the specifics, this U.N. secrecy has gone far to blur the true damage and horrors of Oil-for-Food, leaving the impression that any graft ? if indeed there was such a thing within the program ? was allegedly committed by faceless people employing vague methods, overseen by an unwitting U.N. Secretariat, led by a Secretary-General who earlier this year professed himself ignorant of any wrongdoing by his staff, and who somehow never worked around to alerting the world that Saddam had developed a taste for doing sweet deals via states with conveniently shared borders, such as Jordan and Syria, or veto-wielding members of the Security Council: France, Russia, and China.
Blessedly, the Duelfer report clears away much of the U.N. murk. Volume I, devoted to sources of financing and procurement for Saddam’s regime, provides hundreds of pages of damning details ? lifting much of the cover that U.N. secrecy gave to Saddam, his business partners, and the U.N. itself (which had effectively become one of his chief business partners, thanks both to the 2.2-percent commission collected by Annan’s Secretariat, and the deals parceled out by Saddam to pivotal member states). Duelfer’s report, released Wednesday, includes not only general descriptions of Oil-for-Food corruption, but names, dates, methods, networks, and dollar amounts ? a roster dubbed adroitly by Reuters as Saddam’s “Weapons-of-Mass-Corruption.”
There is everything here from the eye-catching list of Saddam’s oil allocations to Annan’s handpicked head of the program, Benon Sevan (he denies it); to specific allocations of cheap oil for French and Russian government officials; to such low-profile stuff as how Oil-for-Food gave Saddam money and maneuvering room to meddle in the presidential election of Belarus.
There is information on Saddam’s illicit oil-funded contracts to buy from assorted Russian companies such stuff as barrels for antiaircraft guns, missile components, and missile-guidance electronics. There is an illuminating section that explains, “Most of Iraq’s military imports transited Syria by several trading companies, including some headed by high-ranking Syrian government officials” ? including the head of Syrian presidential security, Dhu al-Himma Shalish. There are details on Saddam’s missile-procurement negotiations with North Korea. And there is background on Saddam’s deals with Chinese companies that helped Iraq improve its indigenous-missile capabilities, despite the history, as the report notes, that “China stated publicly on multiple occasions its position that Iraq should fully comply with all UN Security Council resolutions.”
Indeed, there is so much here, involving so many businesses and officials and illicit networks worldwide, that it may take a while for many of the disclosures to be winnowed out, and sink in. But what it boils down to is that the U.N. provided cover for Saddam to steal, smuggle, deal, and bribe his way back toward becoming precisely the kind of entrenched menace that all of the U.N.'s erstwhile integrity and well-paid activity was supposed to prevent ? equipped with weapons that may even now be killing both civilians and Coalition troops in Iraq.
On the WMD front, Duelfer reports that while no weapons of mass murder were found, Saddam had made a point of preserving the know-how. By corrupting the U.N. setup of sanctions and Oil-for-Food, he was deliberately amassing the resources and networks to go right ahead as soon as sanctions were gone.
Among Duelfer’s findings was that Oil-for-Food riches had positioned Saddam to massively ramp up chemical-weapons production in a matter of months. This has already inspired Rep. Joe Barton, who heads one of the assorted congressional inquiries into Oil-for-Food, to write to Annan, demanding further information. “The notion that the United Nations allowed the oil-for-food program to become an oil-for-death program is troublesome, to say the least,” wrote Barton. He added, "Given Mr. Duelfer’s findings, we now ask for your personal involvement in the expeditious discovery and public release of any information in possession of the United Nations related to the diversion of oil-for-food funding into Iraqi chemical weapons programs.
Annan’s office has not been answering questions in recent months on Oil-for-Food. The U.N. deflects all such issues to its own self-investigation, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker ? who has continued Annan’s practice of keeping secret even such basic information as who bought how much bargain-priced oil from Saddam, and who has deferred all question-answering of substance until he delivers his report, maybe sometime next year.
The standard U.N. defense, offered up periodically by Annan and his subordinates since Annan finally conceded this past March that there had been, perhaps, quite a lot of “wrong-doing,” is that Oil-for-Food performed as well as possible under difficult circumstances. A little corruption, we are given to understand, can creep into even the loftiest humanitarian endeavors.
This was not simply a little corruption, however. And it was not vague, and it was not faceless, and it was anything but benign. The Duelfer report takes us right into the caverns of corruption, political rot, arms traffic, and U.N. complicity that under cover of a relief operation was allowing Saddam to to prosper. As we begin to absorb the details, the very least Kofi Annan can contribute is to pursue ? with the same kind of zeal he brought to expanding Oil-for-Food ? a campaign for the kind of U.N. transparency that should have been the first line of defense against this monstrous travesty ever happening in the first place.
? Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.
Great article from the Washington Post on how Saddam manipulated Oil-for-Food to get weapons:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16142-2004Oct7.html
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Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons
By Craig Whitlock and Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A01
BERLIN, Oct. 7 – As part of its stealth effort to evade U.N. sanctions and rebuild its military, the Iraqi government under President Saddam Hussein found that it had no shortage of people around the world who were willing to help. Among them: a French arms dealer known only as “Mr. Claude,” who made a surreptitious visit to Iraq four years ago to provide technical expertise and training.
Mr. Claude worked for Lura, a French company that sold tank carriers to Iraq, according to documents recovered by the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. The mysterious Frenchman may have also helped the Iraqis attempt to acquire military-related radar and microwave technology, despite a U.N. ban on such trade with Iraq since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Other French military contractors came to Baghdad with offers to supply the Iraqi government with helicopters, spare parts for fighter aircraft and air defense systems after 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors withdrew under pressure, according to a report issued this week by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector. The report cites evidence that contacts between the French suppliers and Hussein’s government continued until last year, less than one month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
While not denying that the transfers took place, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, Herve Ladsous, said the accusations “were not verified either with the people themselves or with the authorities of the countries concerned,” according to the Associated Press.
The French were hardly alone in helping Hussein to reinvigorate his military forces during the 12 years that Iraq was under strict U.N. sanctions. Arm dealers and military suppliers from the former Eastern Bloc – Russia, Poland, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine – provided critical assistance to Iraq as it tried to build a long-range missile program and other systems that weapons inspectors feared could have been used someday to launch chemical, biological or even nuclear attacks.
“It was well known within the U.S. government that individuals and companies were selling Iraq various kinds of prohibited items,” said Gary Samore, a nonproliferation specialist in the Clinton administration who now works as an analyst for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
While the United States sought to shut down suppliers through diplomatic and other means, Samore said, it was common knowledge that Iraq was able to bypass sanctions by buying in small quantities and paying high prices, using a network of front companies in Jordan, Syria and other countries in the Middle East.
“The world is awash in conventional arms, and every time there’s been an arms embargo on a country they’ve been able to circumvent it,” he said. “It’s much more difficult to buy more exotic technologies like nuclear weapons, but there are so many private dealers and corrupt state entities, especially in the former Soviet Union. The best you can do is slow down sales, obstruct them or make it more expensive.”
Numerous other nations bought and sold on the Iraqi military shopping network, including such dictatorships as North Korea and the former Yugoslavia before the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic. While some of the countries were politically friendly with or sympathetic to Iraq, the biggest motivation was usually money, according to Duelfer’s report to the CIA.
“As long as the regime had enough cash to pay for these items, it really wouldn’t have been too much of a problem to obtain these things and smuggle them in,” said Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor for Jane’s Sentinel Security Assessments, a London-based magazine. “It just takes people with enough money and the ability to find the right contacts to get their hands on this stuff.”
The Iraqi pipeline extended to four countries – Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Ukraine – that later sent troops to Iraq to join the U.S.-led military coalition.
In Poland, Iraqi intelligence officers helped set up a front company called Ewex, which obtained engines and guidance components for surface-to-air missiles from Polish scrap dealers and middlemen who scoured military surplus stockpiles for the parts, the report said.
U.S. inspectors estimated that Iraq bought about 280 engines from Poland from 2001 to 2003 with the intent of using them to equip a new missile that violated U.N. range limits. The engines had been removed from Polish missiles decommissioned after the Cold War.
Polish authorities arrested some Ewex executives in 2003 on charges of making illegal arms deliveries to Iraq. Purchasing documents confiscated later showed that many of the engines were funneled through Syria.
In Bulgaria, a firm called the JEFF Co. exported more than $7 million worth of warheads, missiles and launcher units to Baghdad in 2002 in violation of U.N. sanctions, the report found. Other Bulgarian traders sold chemicals and machine tools to Iraq that could be used for civilian purposes but were really intended for missile components and other military purposes.
In Romania, Iraqi intelligence agents used diplomatic pouches to send photos of tanks and other military equipment available for sale in that nation back to Baghdad. Although weapons inspectors said it was unclear how much equipment was purchased by the Iraqi government, they did uncover documents after the war showing that a Romanian firm, Uzinexport SA, signed a contract in October 2001 to sell magnets to Iraq that “could have been suitable” for a uranium enrichment program.
In most cases, U.S. weapons inspectors found no clear evidence that officials in those countries were involved in the arms deals. One exception was Ukraine, where leaders gave their blessing to military sales to Iraq.
The Duelfer report calls Ukraine “one of the countries involved in illicit military-related procurement with Iraq” after the 1991 Gulf War, noting that President Leonid Kuchma personally approved the sale of a $100 million antiaircraft radar system to Iraq via a Jordanian intermediary in 2000. Ukrainian officials have since said the sale was never completed, and weapons inspectors said they had not found any evidence that the radar system was shipped to Iraq.
In 2001, Iraqi intelligence agents also bought five motors from a Ukrainian company as part of a project to develop unmanned spy planes. The motors were shipped to Iraq from Ukraine in diplomatic pouches to avoid the attention of international inspectors, the report said.
A Ukrainian electronics professor whose private firm transferred missile engines and motors to Iraqi companies was rewarded with vouchers and credits for more than 7.5 million barrels of Iraqi oil from 1998 to 2000, the report found. The professor, identified as Yuri Orshansky, made about $1.85 million in profits under the U.N. oil-for-food program, which was designed to generate revenue for the Iraqi people under economic sanctions.
Some of the clearest evidence of government corruption, according to the report, involved Russia, a country that has vast storehouses of military technology.
Although the Russian government has denied past accusations that it played a role in supplying arms and military equipment to Hussein’s government, U.S. weapons inspectors reported finding “a significant amount of captured documentation showing contracts between Iraq and Russian companies.”
In one case, a Russian general, Anatoly Makros, formed a joint company with Iraqi partners in 1998 “just to handle the large volume of Russian business,” according to the report, which also cited a former Iraqi diplomat as saying that Russian customs officials ignored the illegal commerce in exchange for bribes.
Trade with Russia was so brisk that Iraqi Embassy officials smuggled military supplies on weekly charter flights from Moscow to Baghdad, according to the former Iraqi diplomat, who was not named in the report. The equipment included radar jammers, night-vision goggles and small missile components.
One Russian company signed contracts valued at about $20 million to provide material for Iraq’s missile systems. Another Russian firm, Uliss, negotiated a deal to support a tank project dubbed “Saddam the Lion,” according to the report.
Frankel reported from London.
More info on the extent of the corruption under Oil for Food. Why do people continually insist it is good to put power in that body of unaccountable bureaucrats that is the U.N.:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16282-2004Oct7.html
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1,300 Oil Vouchers Begin to Tell Story
Hussein Courted A World of Nations, Firms, Individuals
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A30
The immense scope of an Iraqi effort in the late 1990s to curry political support for ending an international trade embargo is reflected in a list of more than 1,300 oil “vouchers” that then-President Saddam Hussein gave to more than a hundred corporations, foreign officials and political parties stretching from North America to Asia, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group.
The vouchers, which provided selective rights to buy Iraqi oil at a discount and to resell it for a huge profit, were provided to both mainstream and opposition political parties in countries such as Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia; to oil companies in Turkey, Japan, Belgium, Italy, Canada and France; to an arms conglomerate in China; and to individuals in Switzerland, Jordan, the Netherlands, Russia, Malaysia and Burma, among others.
Each of the oil sales was approved by the United Nations, which was monitoring Iraqi oil transactions in an effort begun in 1996 – known as the oil-for-food program – to ensure that the resulting revenue was used for humanitarian projects. But Iraq saw the program differently, as a key part of a scheme to free itself from the impact of sanctions and, ultimately, to gain political support for their termination, according to the report.
Although Iraq had to forgo some profit for itself by selling oil to the voucher recipients at a deep discount, the individual concessions Iraq granted helped the country curry foreign political influence and win a series of illicit trade agreements with its neighbors that netted nearly $11 billion between 1990 and 2003.
Subversion of the oil-for-food program by itself produced at least $1.7 billion in revenue, the report said. More than $4 billion came from oil sales to Jordan, while trade with Syria, Turkey and Egypt provided most of the other earnings. In addition, Iraq earned millions of dollars from a “surcharge” that Hussein ordered voucher recipients to pay back to the regime.
The report said the recipients made the payments by carrying bags of cash to Iraqi embassies in Amman, Beirut, Moscow, Ankara, Geneva and Hanoi, among other places. The cash was then sent to Baghdad via diplomatic pouches.
“In the late '90s, we understood that lots of shenanigans were going on . . . under-the-table payments and so on, to curry favor and win support for eroding sanctions,” said Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state. “We made various efforts to limit the scope of this,” he added. But the report said that U.S. officials were blocked by Russia, China and France in 2000 and 2001 when they tried to clamp down on oil sales outside the oil-for-food program.
The names of U.S. companies and individuals who participated in the program were omitted from the report, because of what officials described as U.S. privacy law restrictions. But in June, three U.S. oil companies disclosed that they had received subpoenas in connection with a federal investigation into the program: Exxon Mobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp. and Valero Energy Corp.
Valero has said that it is cooperating fully, that the company had no direct contact with Iraq and that the subpoena does not imply any wrongdoing. Prem Nair, a spokeswoman for Exxon Mobil, said yesterday that the company did not violate any laws. “All purchases were documented as being in full compliance with all laws,” Nair said. ChevronTexaco did not return a phone call.
Overall, 30 percent of the oil vouchers were issued to beneficiaries in Russia, including individual officials in the president’s office, the Russian foreign ministry, the Russian Communist Party, members of the Russian parliament, and the oil firms Lukoil, Gazprom, Zarubezhneft, Sibneft, Rosneft and Tatneft.
Fifteen percent of the beneficiaries were French, including a former interior minister, the Iraqi French Friendship Society and the oil company Total. Entities in China received 10 percent of the vouchers, and entities in Switzerland received 6 percent, as did entities in Malaysia and in Syria.
The oil concessions to some countries evidently helped pave the way for imports of prohibited military gear. For example, a Serbian political party run by Mirjana Markovic, the wife of former Serbian president and current war crimes indictee Slobodan Milosevic, received Hussein’s authorization to buy millions of barrels of oil and earn millions of dollars in profit, according to the report.
Between 1999 and 2002, government officials in Serbia and Montenegro – which at the outset made up Yugoslavia – provided jet engine components to Iraq and negotiated the sale of missile technology and equipment, as well as components for tank guns, according to the report and other sources. The trade was halted under U.S. and allied pressure.
Each of the oil voucher recipients was handpicked by Hussein, based on recommendations from his diplomats and intelligence service, according to the CIA report, which was written by Charles A. Duelfer, a diplomat who helped direct the investigation. Hussein “made all modifications to the list,” the CIA report said.
U.N. Security Council members who were alleged to have abetted Hussein in his scheme to thwart the sanctions reacted sharply to the charges in the report, saying they unfairly smeared foreign governments and companies while letting the unnamed U.S. companies off the hook.
“We don’t know whether the allegations are true or not, but we know some reputations are being tarnished and we know that these people were not contacted and that the governments were not contacted prior to the publication of the report,” said Nathalie Loiseau, a spokeswoman for the French Embassy in Washington.
Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Fayssal Mekdad, declined to comment on the report’s assertions that Syria was a major player in Hussein’s scheme, buying hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi oil outside the U.N. program and providing a banking center that allowed Iraq’s commercial partners to deposit kickbacks and payoffs.
“Allegations are allegations,” Mekdad said. He added that he will respond more fully after he has had a chance to read the report.
U.S. and British diplomats expressed a sense of vindication over the report’s findings, saying that the document shows that Hussein had intentionally exploited the world’s humanitarian impulses to steal money from ordinary Iraqis.
Staff writer Justin Blum contributed to this report. Lynch reported from the United Nations.
Wow, are you trying to say Saddam was actually a bad guy? No shit Sherlock!
[quote]vroom wrote:
Wow, are you trying to say Saddam was actually a bad guy? No shit Sherlock![/quote]
Scroll up on this thread and see who it was who wanted to wait until there were more details concerning the Oil-for-Food program.
Here are your details.
The whole Oil-for-food program was rife with abuse – now we’ll see if the U.N. will release the contracts so that the money can be traced.
Of course, given that they’re unaccountable bureaucrats, they can sit there and refuse, and no one is going to make them. We could always just withhold dues again I guess.