Conservatives use oil-for-food to hammer U.N.

The price of containment through sanctions? Look the other way when key Allies are part of the corruption. Of course, blame the UN for the poor oversight... and probably the previous administration. Those who control the past...

From the article:

"The Washington Post reported on November 13 that Edward Mortimer, communications director for the U.N. Secretary-General's office, claimed that the 661 Committee chose to approve 70 separate contracts beginning in late 2001 that were 'potentially overpriced':

Over the next 18 months [after 'the Greek captain of the oil tanker Essex admitted conspiring with Iraq to smuggle $10 million worth of crude oil' in October 2001], U.N. officials presented the sanctions committee with 70 contracts that were potentially overpriced, Mortimer said. But 'nobody placed a single contract on hold,' he said -- including the United States and Britain, Baghdad's toughest critics on the Security Council."

....

"FOX News host Bill O'Reilly expressed outrage on the December 6 edition of The O'Reilly Factor that "the U.N. oil-for-food program degenerated into a criminal enterprise, feeding Saddam more than $20 billion in illegal revenue." On the December 3 edition of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show, radio host Limbaugh put the figure at "$22.3 billion at last count." In fact, the amount is, at most, one-fourth of what O'Reilly and Limbaugh claimed. And Saddam obtained a much larger portion of the illicit revenue he used to prop up his regime through oil smuggling outside U.N. auspices.

The GAO report estimated that of the $10.1 billion in illegal oil revenues, only $4.4 billion came from "surcharges against oil sales and illicit commissions from commodity suppliers," i.e., kickbacks, compared to $5.7 billion from oil smuggling that was outside of U.N. control.

The Central Intelligence Agency's Duelfer report similarly estimated that of the nearly $11 billion in illicit income that Saddam obtained from August 1990 until March 2003, only $1.5 billion, or 16 percent, came through oil-for-food [Volume 1, PDF p. 158]. According to the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program (OIP), sales of oil under oil-for-food generated $65 billion in revenue."

....

"Former assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs Robert Pelletreau spoke more bluntly about the U.S. position on Iraqi oil smuggling to Turkey in an the December 2004 Harper's Magazine article by Joy Gordon. Gordon wrote: "Turkey, like Jordan, complained that that the sanctions were harming its economy. And Turkey, like Jordan, was a crucial ally the United States needed to appease. The result was a decision by the United States 'to close our eyes to leakage via Turkey,' according to ... Pelletreau."