Oil-for-Food Scandal and the Links to al-Q

I think this piece by Claudia Rosset is well worth reading, as is the majority of the work she's done on a topic the MSM ignores while pursuing stuff like Bush's Guard duty. This time, we're dealing with where the money from the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program went, other than Saddam's pockets...

The original United Nations plan was to let Saddam sell oil solely to buy humanitarian goods such as food and medicine, with the U.N. Secretariat collecting a 2.2 percent commission on Saddam's oil sales to supervise the integrity of this process.

As the Oil-for-Food program actually worked, however, the United Nations let Saddam choose his own business partners. The world body also kept secret the details of those contracts and the identities of the contractors, and it let Saddam graft at least $4.4 billion out of the program through manipulated contract prices, by estimates of the U.S. General Accountability Office.

Saddam's standard scam was to underprice oil sales and overpay for relief supplies, thus generating fat profits for his business partners. Many of those contractors would kick back part of the take to Saddam's regime — or divert it to whatever uses Saddam might fancy. By various accounts, those uses ranged from building palaces to buying arms to supplying Saddam's sadistic son Uday with equipment for torturing Iraqi athletes.

One of the big questions is whether any of the money skimmed from Oil-for-Food also slopped into terrorist-financing ventures such as MIGA.

It's important to note that in tracking terrorist financing, the simplest starting points are the visible links, the potential connections through which money might most easily have flowed. Proving that funds actually coursed through those conduits is far more difficult.

Read the rest. It's well worth the time.

Note the following:

1. I think the benefits other countries were gaining from this corruption made them far less likely to follow through on the mistaken intel regarding WMD before the war. I definitely think Kofi Annan's recent comment about Iraq constituting an "illegal war" was designed to distract from this growing scandal. This is one of the reasons I've hammered on the point about WMD reports that other countries had as well -- they had the reports and refused to say the reports were wrong (perhaps their intel people feared being proven wrong and wanted to report the worst-case scenario), but their decision not to go to war had nothing to do with disbelieving the intel so much as it did self-interest of protecting profits.

2. I think that while everyone dithers about whether there's a link between Saddam and 9/11, they're missing the obvious. There is and was a link, especially in the financing of affiliated terrorist groups. Let me be clear -- that has noting to do with 9/11 itself. And there's a legitimate point to be made that one could have made decisions far less costly and short of war in Iraq to take out the sources of such financing. But please note that sanctions and inspections regimes had done nothing. The problem is not so much the issue of how you shut down the financing, but prevent the next leak in the dam from taking place. This is an important issue in the War on Terror -- how do we deprive these groups of the money they need to operate.

3. Anyone who still thinks the U.N. should be a trusted partner when we are making decisions about the security of our country needs to have their head examined.