Say Anything Blog

As though the oil-for-food scandal weren't bad enough we learn that Saddam Hussein profitted nearly twice as much from it as previously thought.

WASHINGTON - Over more than a decade, Saddam Hussein's government raised more than $21.3 billion in illegal revenue by subverting U.N. sanctions against Iraq including the humanitarian oil-for-food program, congressional investigators estimated Monday.

That's double the $10 billion the Iraqi president previously was alleged to have siphoned off. The earlier estimate included only the oil-for-food program. The new, higher number includes illicit profits from efforts like the illegal smuggling of oil in the years of sanctions that preceded the humanitarian program that began in 1996.

"The magnitude of fraud perpetrated by Saddam Hussein in contravention of U.N. sanctions and the oil-for-food program is staggering," Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said Monday as his Senate Government Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations began a hearing on the subject.

"This is like an onion -- we just keep uncovering more layers and more layers," he said.

New figures on Iraq's alleged surcharges, kickbacks and oil-smuggling are based on new documents obtained by the committee's investigative panel. The documents illustrate how Iraqi officials, foreign companies and sometimes politicians allegedly contrived to bring vast illicit gains to Saddam's government and how he tried to buy support abroad for a move to get the United Nations to lift sanctions, officials said.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the humanitarian program was that it allowed Saddam to decide who would get oil contracts, said Charles Duelfer, the last chief U.S. arms inspector in Iraq who also studied Saddam's efforts to subvert sanctions.

Giving the Iraqi president discretion over contracts "was the largest lever that we offered him," Duelfer told the committee.

Got all that folks? This is the single largest case of fraud and bribery ever to be executed on the globe and it was brought to you by the friendly bureaucrats at the United Nations.

Kofi Annan, his son and all the other UN officials complicit in this scandal should be thrown in jail.

Update:

The UN caused this mess, the least they could do is cooperate in cleaning it up.

The New York Times - "I'm angry that we find the U.N. proactively interfering with our investigation," Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, informed Lou Dobbs on CNN, "by telling certain folks not to cooperate with us." He repeated for emphasis his sharp response to Secretary General Kofi Annan's "interfering with our ability to get information we need" about the oil-for-food scandal.