Solomonia Archive: When does Claudia Rosett collect her Pulitzer?

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

When does Claudia Rosett collect her Pulitzer?

She continues her crusade to shine the light on Oil-for-Food (aka UNSCUM, aka UNSCAM, aka Oil of Uday...) in today's OpinionJournal.

Oil-for-Terror - U.N. Iraq money may have ended up in accounts tied to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

...U.N. secrecy--in deference to the privacy of Saddam and his former clientele--makes it extremely difficult to confirm the many whiffs of sleazy and sinister dealings in these lists. But for an example of how dirty Oil-for-Food could get, take the case of one of Saddam's U.N.-authorized relief suppliers, a company called Al Wasel & Babel General Trading LLC, set up in Dubai, in 1999. This same Al Wasel & Babel was designated by Treasury earlier this month as a front company set up by senior officials of Saddam's regime to serve as a foreign seller of goods to Saddam's regime, through Oil-for-Food (while trying to procure for Iraq a surface-to-air-missile system).

And although full information is hard to come by, partial lists leaked from the U.N. show that in 2000-2001 alone, Saddam's regime ordered up from Al Wasel and Babel more than $190 million in construction materials, trucks, cars and so on. Over Mr. Annan's and Mr. Sevan's protests, the U.S. and U.K. blocked some $45 million worth of those contracts; that still left the Saddam front company of Al Wasel & Babel with about $145 million of Oil-for-Food business for that two year period alone.

Basically, Oil-for-Food was Saddam--just slightly harder to spot, swaddled as he was in that blue U.N. flag.

Update: Roger L. Simon comments.

Posted by Solomon at 12:16 PM on Wednesday, Apr 28, 2004 | Comments (4)
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4 Comments

#1 mal | April 28, 2004 1:18 PM

http://acepilots.com/unscam/

Have you seen this blog?

#2 Solomon | April 28, 2004 1:25 PM

Yes, briefly. Keep meaning to link it. Will do so.

#3 Solomon | April 28, 2004 1:30 PM

Have done it. (In the drop-down box)

#4 mal | April 28, 2004 1:43 PM

http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/19737.htm

April 28, 2004 --
WASHINGTON - A former manager in the scandal-scarred oil for food program will tell Congress today how top U.N. officials running the program deliberately looked the other way, congressional officials said last night.

Frenchman Michael Soussan, a former program coordinator for the $100 billion fund, is expected to be the star witness of a House International Relations Committee hearing looking into Saddam's gigantic $10.1 billion rip-off.

Committee sources said Soussan, now a New York-area writer, is expected to give the first, under oath, public account from an insider about how top U.N. officials were aware of Saddam's oil smuggling and kickback schemes but chose to let him get away with it.

Allegations surfaced in a Baghdad newspaper earlier this year that Benon Sevan, the director of the program, was among 270 sympathetic international political and financial figures who received sweetheart oil deals from Saddam. Niles Lathem