WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's regime reaped over $21 billion from kickbacks and smuggling before and during the now-defunct U.N. oil-for-food program, twice as much as previous estimates, according to a U.S. Senate probe on Monday.
The monies flowed between 1991 and 2003 through oil surcharges, kickbacks on civilian goods and smuggling directly to willing governments, Senate investigators said at a hearing.
"How was the world so blind to this massive amount of influence-peddling?" asked Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, head of the investigations subcommittee.
Coleman made public more documents he said were evidence of bigger kickbacks and payments than what was previously known, including 2003 data previously not reviewed.
The new Senate figure is about double the amount estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which had pegged it at $10.1 billion. Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, had estimated about the same amount based on Iraqi documents, with $2 billion through the U.N. program and $8 billion in smuggling by road or sea or in direct illegal agreements with governments.
The oil-for-food program began in December 1996 to alleviate the impact on ordinary Iraqis of sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The U.N. Security Council allowed Iraq to sell oil and buy food, medicine and other goods and let Baghdad draw up its own contracts.
This left room for abuse in the $64 billion program, administered by the United Nations and monitored by a U.N. Security Council panel, including the United States, according to investigators.
Oil smuggling alone netted Saddam's regime about $9.7 billion, with other funds flowing from switching substandard goods with top-grade ones, as well as exploiting food and medicine shipments to the Kurds in Iraq's north.
Panel investigators also echoed the findings by Duelfer, head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, that Saddam's regime gave lucrative contracts to buy Iraqi oil to high-ranking officials in Russia, France and other nations.
On the list of 270 individuals, businesses and political parties was the head of the U.N. oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, who has vigorously denied the charges.
Other recipients include Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Russian Liberal Democrat Party. The Senate panel released a document signed by Zhirinovsky in January 1999 that invited a U.S. oil company to Moscow to negotiate to buy the oil voucher. The name of the U.S. company was withheld because of pending investigations, panel staff said. Continued ...
There was some American oversight, but the guy running the program was a UN diplomat.
BoTM / JL / MM / HAB / VRWC / Horseman
I'm studying for the CPA exam. Have a nice summer, and if you're down just sit back and realize that Joe is off somewhere, doing much worse than you are.
You mean the entire program was run by one guy? How efficient!
Semantics. He was in charge of the program; i.e., he was responsible for management and supervision, so the buck stops with him.
Until the investigation is over, we won't know all parties involved in the corruption.
That is true, however at this point we know that the program was run entirely by the UN, and that it was entirely corrupt.
BoTM / JL / MM / HAB / VRWC / Horseman
I'm studying for the CPA exam. Have a nice summer, and if you're down just sit back and realize that Joe is off somewhere, doing much worse than you are.
Does that work with Bush too? Or did the CIA get rightly blammed for stuffing some of the things up?
Not exactly the same situation; Bush is the President, in charge of a rather vast amount of offices and agencies; the UN guy was in charge of a single program. Not that Bush shouldn't shoulder his fair share of the blame for the CIA's bumbling, the same way Kofi Annan and the UN as a whole must shoulder their fair share of the blame for the oil-for-food scandal.
Yes, but since the US makes up the UN, let's wait to see who else was in on it by being directly involved or being grossly incompetent.
The US is in the UN, but the UN as an operational body is its own entity, and they, not the US, ran the oil-for-food program. If US oversight failed to pick up on the corruption, then shame on us, but that doesn't change the fact that it was ultimately the UN that was responsible for the way the program was run.
BoTM / JL / MM / HAB / VRWC / Horseman
I'm studying for the CPA exam. Have a nice summer, and if you're down just sit back and realize that Joe is off somewhere, doing much worse than you are.
Yes, but since the US makes up the UN, let's wait to see who else was in on it by being directly involved or being grossly incompetent.
The US is in the UN, but the UN as an operational body is its own entity, and they, not the US, ran the oil-for-food program.
You're half way there. The UN employees were given most of the grunt work. However from the article:
This left room for abuse in the $64 billion program, administered by the United Nations and monitored by a U.N. Security Council panel, including the United States, according to investigators.
If US oversight failed to pick up on the corruption, then shame on us, but that doesn't change the fact that it was ultimately the UN that was responsible for the way the program was run.
Unless you know how culpabile the countries "monitoring" the program are, it's best to wait until the investigation is over before blamming everything on the UN.
well BS, i will conceide that the US diplomats involved with the UN oil for food program have at least some responsibilty for the corruption, but no more than France, Germany, Britian, Russia, China, Austrailia, Canada or any other member state with ties to the program. Blaming the United States exclusively is like blaming Houston for the Enron scandal because some of the employees are from that particular city.
"This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” -Tom Clancy
BoredShirtless wrote:I didn't blame the US exclusively, nor can you spread the blame evenly before the investigation is complete.
Like fucking hell you didn't.
Bored Shirtless in the SECOND POST ON THE TOPIC wrote:Isn't the US part of the UN? Wasn't the US charged with monitoring the oil for food program? Why didn't the US pick this up while it was happening?
Yep, no blame shoved on the US right away there. Nothing to see, move along.
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