"U.N. Oil corruption"

Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan, United Nations political cartoon.

April 20, 2004

U.N. financed terror
by Roger Wm. Hughes

The United Nations has long been an irrelevant debating society that has wasted funds in ways that would have made Tammany Hall bosses green with envy. Now, the U.N. is clearly involved in corruption on a grand world scale, amounting to over $10 billion in kickbacks and corruption. Money that helped Saddam Hussein continue his reign of terror. Money that helped allow Hussein to do things like lower his own people into shredders -- feet first. It was also money that helped Hussein’s son, Uda, continue to rape and torture people in his basement. Wonderful things for the U.N. to have helped finance and received a little bit of graft as well.

However, we need not fear because the U.N. has come to understand that the world will not allow them to investigate the graft and corruption themselves. About the only thing we can expect is for the U.N. to clean up the truth so that we will never know it. Hopefully, President Reagan’s friend at the Federal Reserve Board, Paul Vocker, can sort it out. He has been appointed to head the investigation.

You see, the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's own son --  Kojo Annan -- had ties to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil for Food supplies into Iraq. These were the same supplies sent in under terms of those tens of billions of dollars worth of U.N.-approved contracts in which the U.N. says it failed to notice Hussein's widespread arrangements to overpay contractors who then shipped overpriced goods to the impoverished people of Iraq and kicked back part of their profits to Saddam's regime. Kojo Annan had a consulting contract with Cotecna.

Cotecna was paid roughly $6 million for its services during that first year in charge of overseeing the Food for Oil program. The U.N. will not release figures on Cotecna's fees over the following years. Any thinking person knows that $6 million is not enough to pay for inspecting tens of billions of dollars worth of supplies inbound to a regime that is expert in smuggling -- and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks as a routine part of business. So, how trustworthy were the inspectors?

If anyone was wondering about Turkey’s failure to help the United States get rid of Hussein and his reign of terror, take a look at a July 2001 report titled, "Monitoring Arrangements and Reported Violations." The U.N. Security Council Sanctions Committee acknowledged it had received evidence that Saddam was earning as much as $1 billion a year through illegal oil smuggling through Syria and Turkey. No wonder, it took $6 billion to get Turkey to consider helping America.

The NY Post reports today on testimony before Congress that demonstrates several instances where the U.S. and Britain made informal and formal complaints:

The paper took note of the publication of a list of 270 prominent international business and political figures who received sweetheart oil deals in the form of vouchers that allowed them to buy Iraqi oil at below-market prices and resell at a 50 cent per-barrel profit.

The biggest number of the deals went to businesses and political figures in Russia and France.

"If some of the allegations prove true, it is quite possible those citizens were able to exert some influence on the decisions of their governments to reject additional controls on Iraq and to oppose the war," the report said.

Russia dropped its opposition to a U.N. resolution endorsing an investigation of the U.N. Oil for Food program for Iraq, clearing the way for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to take charge of the inquiry. It is expected that a resolution authorizing the investigation will come from the U.N. soon.

It is clear that the U.S. is stuck between two conflicting powers, both of which want America to be weakened: 1) Europe, who wants the U.S. cut down to their size as France and Germany’s presidents have stated in public and their foreign ministers have put in writing, and 2) an Islamic extremist group who wants America and Western Civilization destroyed.

The question that keeps arising is this: why do the Democrats (especially John Kerry) want to bring in the U.N. and sell America short?