Replies to post #75305 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

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U.S. weapons report details corruption of oil-for-food program
The United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The sanctions were modified in 1996, when the oil-for-food program was created to address the suffering of Iraqis.

At the time, world support for the continued embargo was weakening. The idea was that Iraq could sell some of its oil so long as proceeds went to food or medicine, not weapons.

However, Saddam Hussein's regime found ways to turn the program to its advantage. That corruption is detailed in a report released last week by the chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles DUELFER.

Questions and answers on the issue prepared by USA TODAY reporter Steven Komarow.

Q: Did the oil-for-food program help the plight of poor Iraqis, who suffered because of the embargo aimed at punishing Saddam?

A: Yes. Under the program, $31 billion was spent on food, medicine and related items that significantly improved the health and nutrition of average Iraqis. But that money also weakened the political effectiveness of the embargo, because Saddam's regime was less threatened under the improved Iraqi economy. And, in addition to the food purchases, over time his government found several ways of using oil-for-food to raise illicit funds to further evade the embargo.

Q: How did Saddam corrupt the program to his advantage?

A: The renewed overseas shipments of oil provided opportunities for kickbacks and smuggling. Saddam created a voucher system, whereby people who helped the regime were rewarded with shares of profits from oil-for-food oil sales. And Saddam oversaw distribution of the food and medicine inside Iraq, providing a powerful tool for controlling domestic dissent.

Q: Who benefited from the lucrative oil vouchers issued by Saddam?

A: The Iraqi dictator targeted countries and individuals who could help him evade economic sanctions and eventually overturn them.

Officials from France, Russia and China were favored but many others also were named in the U.S. report as potential beneficiaries of the practice, which was not necessarily illegal. Among those whose names were found by the inspectors: Benon Sevan, the former chief of the oil-for-food program; Charles Pasqua, former French interior minister; President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, and Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Many of those named quickly denounced the report as containing unfounded allegations, because Iraqi records don't necessarily prove that Saddam's entreaties were accepted or that favors were done.

The inspectors also listed American companies and individuals. Their names were omitted from the officially released report because of U.S. privacy laws.

Q: How much money did Saddam make in evading the sanctions, including oil-for-food?

A: His regime got about $11 billion in illicit revenue from 1990 to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Most of it, about $7.5 billion, was from selling oil to neighboring countries, sometimes with tacit U.N. approval. After 1996, more than $2 billion came into Saddam's direct control from the oil-for-food program and related corruption.

Q: Did Saddam buy nuclear, biological or chemical weapons with the money?

A: The regime's weapons purchases were mostly conventional, such as ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades. But Saddam also dreamed of restarting his chemical and nuclear arms programs after the embargo was lifted. To keep that hope alive, and to maintain a base of research and sophisticated skills in Iraq, he bought"dual-use" machinery that had civilian uses but could be converted for production of banned weapons.

Q: Who helped Saddam violate the embargo and sell him weapons and prohibited machinery and supplies?

A: Saddam apparently had little trouble finding people willing to profit from the illegal trade. Companies in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen were buyers for Saddam. Technology came especially from states of the former Soviet bloc, including Belarus. Russian and French arms experts visited Iraq seeking contracts to rebuild its missile program. Iraq's foreign ministry and Iraqi intelligence carefully shepherded the most sensitive sales and often did business in cash to avoid detection.

Q: Was it always improper to do business with Saddam?

A: No, the oil-for-food program provided legitimate avenues for business. For example, oil sold under U.N. auspices was processed by major oil companies that do business all over the world, including in the USA.

However, several investigations were underway even before the DUELFER report was released. Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is heading a U.N. commission probing corruption in the program. At the center of that probe: Saddam's apparent effort to win support from key U.N. members by offering vouchers and other favors to their companies and officials. And a U.S. federal court in New York City is looking into possible criminal violations.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-10-10-embargo-qna_x.htm

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Revealing Reading

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Scandal: A great debate has raged over why so many of the world's major countries suddenly went all weak in the knees when the U.S. went after Saddam Hussein. A new CIA report makes the reason clear, and it isn't pretty.

The report by Charles DUELFER, chief weapons inspector of the Iraq Survey Group, sketches out in plain language what could be the biggest bribery scandal of the last century — one that reaches into the highest political circles. It makes for shocking reading.

It shows how Saddam evaded U.N. sanctions from 1997 to 2003 by illicitly selling oil through other countries and bribing world leaders, up-and-coming politicians, journalists, businesses, even the U.N. itself. In the process he cleared $11 billion in illegal profits.

The report names names. Anyone who could help him regain weapons of mass destruction was a target. He settled on Russia, France and China — three of the five U.N. Security Council members that, with the stroke of a veto pen, could stop the U.N. from going to war or end economic sanctions against his country.

Even more stunning than the fact of the bribery is its scope and depth. The list of those who helped Saddam cheat and got paid for it is long and depressing.

It includes Charles Pasqua, France's former interior minister; Megawati Sukarnoputri, president of Indonesia; and Benon Sevan, former head of the U.N.'s Iraq sanctions program. Also named are a large number of Russian government officials and fixers and the governments of Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Egypt and China.

And that's just a few. The list is hundreds of names long.

Saddam's strategy was simple: keep the U.S. off his back. American and British planes were buzzing over Iraq's "no-fly" zones since the 1991 end of the Gulf War, and Saddam was forced to suspend his WMD program due to U.N. inspections.

To get his way, Saddam gave, in the words of the report, "preferential treatment to Russian and French companies hoping for Russian and French support on the UN Security Council."

That is, he bribed them. He wanted U.N. sanctions ended so he could go back to making chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

France proved to be an easy target. So was Russia.

In the case of France, Iraqi intelligence "targeted a number of French individuals that Iraq thought had a close relationship to French President Chirac," the DUELFER report said. Iraq even toyed with the idea of supporting a candidate in the French elections — though there's no evidence Iraq gave Chirac money directly.

Still, a member of the French Parliament, according to a memo sent to Saddam in May 2002, "assured Iraq that France would use its veto in the U.N. Security Council against any American decision to attack Iraq." That is, once bribed, France would stay bribed.

All in all, a scandal of epic proportions. But what can be made of it? Well, a number of things:

For one, it's a devastating blow to John Kerry's much-ballyhooed "plan" to end the war in Iraq by holding an international conference of nations — including France, Russia and China — to decide Iraq's future. Given what we know of those nations' complicity with Saddam's murderous regime, that's no longer an option.

Also shattered is Kerry's assertion that patient diplomacy might have disarmed Iraq and brought Saddam to heel. French, Russian and Chinese efforts to subvert U.S. actions against Iraq show they would have opposed us no matter what. They were merely providing the service they were paid for.

Then there's Kerry's assertion that future action in Iraq must pass a "global test." That, too, now seems ridiculous.

Iraq's cheating on sanctions corrupted a major world forum — the U.N. — along with many of its most influential members. Put bluntly, the U.N. can't be trusted. Nor can France, Russia or China. Despite pretenses, none of them can be counted as a U.S. ally.

Too bad. In coming months, tough decisions will have to be made in Iraq — how much force to use, how to hold elections, how to rebuild. We'll have to make them with our existing coalition.

It should have been a broader effort of many nations — one that potentially led to the blossoming of democracy across the Mideast.

Instead, a massive bribery scandal has revealed the rank cynicism and open dishonesty of many nations we used to trust.

We commend the DUELFER report to your attention. It shows clearly we were right to get rid of Saddam. Perhaps more important, it shows just as clearly whom we can still call friends.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/issues.asp

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The Buried Truth
A new book shows that Saddam didn't have nuclear weapons—yet.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Friday, Oct. 8, 2004, at 1:04 PM PT

It's a good coincidence that the DUELFER report appears in the same week as The Bomb In My Garden, a memoir by Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear physicist. Between them, or taken together, the two bodies of evidence enable two quite different yet quite compatible conclusions. The first is that the Saddam regime was more disarmed than perhaps even its leadership knew. The second is that it would have been very unwise to proceed on any assumption except that of its latent danger.

This may seem like an attempt to have it both ways, but consider: We only know all of this, about the Baathist weapons programs and their erosion and collapse, because of regime change. Up until then, any assumption that all the fangs had been removed would have been a highly irresponsible one. It would have involved, quite simply, taking Saddam Hussein's word for it. His prior record of deception, double-dealing, and concealment makes that quite impossible. The long-felt need was for an administration that did not give him the benefit of any doubt, that had a nasty and suspicious mind, and that would resolve any ambiguity on the presumption of guilt.

Few felt this need more strongly than Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, whose crucial evidence we would never have acquired without the invasion. His book is one of the three or four accounts that anyone remotely interested in the Iraq debate will simply have to read. Apart from its insight into the workings of the Saddam nuclear project, it provides a haunting account of the atmosphere of sheer evil that permeated every crevice of Iraqi life under the old regime. It is morally impossible to read it and not rejoice at that system's ignominious and long-overdue removal.

Having been forcibly recruited, with his family as hostage, into the Saddam nuclear program, Obeidi describes the hysterical pressure exerted by the crime family that ran Iraq. Almost weeping with fear, scientists were lashed into prostituting their skills in the rush for a usable nuke. In the meantime, their country's deepest veins were being drained to finance the enterprise. It's alarming to read how easy it was for Obeidi, backed by an open checkbook, to acquire blueprints and components on the open market: Saddam was in this business in much the same way as A.Q. Khan, the former sales director of Pakistan's nuclear bazaar. Only now can we know how close he came, and we came. Having starved and bled his people, Saddam sought to revive them by invading Kuwait: a mistake we must all be very glad he made. He might have got the nuclear capacity before he invaded, in which case we would be living in a rather different world. As it was, his insane bluff was called—and as the coalition struck back, Iraqi scientists were taken to offices run by illiterate brutes who screamed at them to produce just one "dirty" bomb on short notice. Providentially, this was not quite possible.

The subsequent arrival of the inspectors meant that Saddam, despite elaborate deceptions and dummyings (very well-described by Obeidi) was never able to get back up to speed again. His regime also began to suffer from interclan warfare with the defection of the Kamel brothers to Jordan and the further exposure of the Baathist arms racket. However, there was a secret that the Kamel brothers were not able to betray. Under the orders of Qusai Hussein, Dr. Obeidi had buried a huge barrel in his back garden. The barrel contained Iraq's crowning achievement in perverted physics: the components of an actual centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium. It also contained all the hard-won printed instructions and expertise on the subject. Dr. Obeidi was "interviewed" by many inspectors in the run-up to last year's war under the same conditions of open blackmail that Saddam had imposed on all his other scientists, and they got no nearer finding out the truth than one would have expected.

His conclusion is that, given an improvement in the economic and political climate, Saddam could and would have done one of two things: reconstitute the program or share it with others. Had it not been for 9/11, it is sobering to reflect, there would have been senior members of even this administration arguing that sanctions on Iraq should be eased. And, through the open scandal of the oil-for-food program, there were many states or clienteles within states who were happy to help Saddam enrich himself. Moreover, within the "box" that supposedly "contained" him were also living Kim Jong-il, A.Q. Khan, and Col. Qaddafi. We know from the Kay report that, as late as March of last year, Saddam's envoys were meeting North Korea's team in Damascus and trying to buy missiles off the shelf. It would never have stopped: this ceaseless ambition to acquire the means of genocide. If anything, we underestimated that aspect of it.

The supposed overestimate was, in reality, part of a wider underestimate. Libya and Iran turned out to be even more dangerous than we had thought, and the A.Q. Khan network of "Nukes 'R' Us" even more widespread. But now Iraq can be certified as disarmed, instead of wishfully assumed to be so, Libya's fissile materials are all under lock and key in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the traces "walked back" from Qaddafi's capitulation helped expose A.Q. Khan. Of course, we could always have left Iraq alone, and brought nearer the day when the charming Qusai could have called for Dr. Obeidi and said: "That barrel of yours. It's time to dig it up."

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcoming.

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Saddam’s Sugar Daddy
The facts about the U.N.’s corrupt Oil-for-Food relationship with the deposed Iraqi tyrant are further exposed.

CIA chief weapons inspector Charles DUELFER may not have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he sure found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

As DUELFER documents, Oil-for-Food allowed Saddam to replenish his empty coffers, firm up his networks for hiding money and buying arms, corrupt the U.N.'s own debates over Iraq, greatly erode sanctions and deliberately prep the ground for further rearming, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons. As set up and run by the U.N., Oil-for-Food devolved into a depraved and increasingly dangerous mockery of what was advertised by the U.N. as a relief program for sick and starving Iraqis.

The report notes that the start of Oil-for-Food, in 1996, marked the revival of Saddam's post-Gulf War fortunes. His regime amassed some $11 billion in illicit funds between the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and his overthrow by the U.S.-led Coalition in 2003. Most of that money flowed in from 1996-2003, during the era of Oil-for-Food. One might add that what allowed this dirty money to stack up was U.N. policy — urged along and overseen by Annan, in the name of aid — that allowed Saddam to import the equipment to revive Iraq's oil production, all of it accruing to Saddam. Saddam's regime had virtually no other source of income; there was no tax base. It was out of these oil flows, condoned (but not well metered) by the U.N., that Saddam derived virtually all income for the astounding roster of political bribery and illicit arms transactions detailed in this report.

Saddam followed a deliberate strategy of using bribes in such forms as contracts for cheap oil via the U.N. program, or outright gifts of vouchers for oil pumped under U.N. supervision, to gain political influence abroad. He grossly violated U.N. rules, with illicit trade agreements, oil smuggling, and arms deals (conventional, but still deadly) — and the U.N. did not stop him. By 2001, Saddam was able to thwart many of the constraints sanctions were meant to impose on his regime. His strategy, notes the DUELFER report, succeeded "to the point where sitting members of the Security Council were actively violating resolutions passed by the Security Council."

But no one has ever heard these facts from the U.N. itself, certainly not from such prime violators as France, Russia, and Syria — nor from the man most directly responsible for protecting the honor of the institution, Secretary-General Annan. Instead, Annan has to this day refused even to disclose to the public such basic details as the names of Saddam's contractors or the terms of their deals.

By greatly obscuring the specifics, this U.N. secrecy has gone far to blur the true damage and horrors of Oil-for-Food, leaving the impression that any graft — if indeed there was such a thing within the program — was allegedly committed by faceless people employing vague methods, overseen by an unwitting U.N. Secretariat, led by a Secretary-General who earlier this year professed himself ignorant of any wrongdoing by his staff, and who somehow never worked around to alerting the world that Saddam had developed a taste for doing sweet deals via states with conveniently shared borders, such as Jordan and Syria, or veto-wielding members of the Security Council: France, Russia, and China.

Blessedly, the DUELFER report clears away much of the U.N. murk. Volume I, devoted to sources of financing and procurement for Saddam's regime, provides hundreds of pages of damning details — lifting much of the cover that U.N. secrecy gave to Saddam, his business partners, and the U.N. itself (which had effectively become one of his chief business partners, thanks both to the 2.2-percent commission collected by Annan's Secretariat, and the deals parceled out by Saddam to pivotal member states). DUELFER's report, released Wednesday, includes not only general descriptions of Oil-for-Food corruption, but names, dates, methods, networks, and dollar amounts — a roster dubbed adroitly by Reuters as Saddam's "Weapons-of-Mass-Corruption."

There is everything here from the eye-catching list of Saddam's oil allocations to Annan's handpicked head of the program, Benon Sevan (he denies it); to specific allocations of cheap oil for French and Russian government officials; to such low-profile stuff as how Oil-for-Food gave Saddam money and maneuvering room to meddle in the presidential election of Belarus.

There is information on Saddam's illicit oil-funded contracts to buy from assorted Russian companies such stuff as barrels for antiaircraft guns, missile components, and missile-guidance electronics. There is an illuminating section that explains, "Most of Iraq's military imports transited Syria by several trading companies, including some headed by high-ranking Syrian government officials" — including the head of Syrian presidential security, Dhu al-Himma Shalish. There are details on Saddam's missile-procurement negotiations with North Korea. And there is background on Saddam's deals with Chinese companies that helped Iraq improve its indigenous-missile capabilities, despite the history, as the report notes, that "China stated publicly on multiple occasions its position that Iraq should fully comply with all UN Security Council resolutions."

Indeed, there is so much here, involving so many businesses and officials and illicit networks worldwide, that it may take a while for many of the disclosures to be winnowed out, and sink in. But what it boils down to is that the U.N. provided cover for Saddam to steal, smuggle, deal, and bribe his way back toward becoming precisely the kind of entrenched menace that all of the U.N.'s erstwhile integrity and well-paid activity was supposed to prevent — equipped with weapons that may even now be killing both civilians and Coalition troops in Iraq.

On the WMD front, DUELFER reports that while no weapons of mass murder were found, Saddam had made a point of preserving the know-how. By corrupting the U.N. setup of sanctions and Oil-for-Food, he was deliberately amassing the resources and networks to go right ahead as soon as sanctions were gone.

Among DUELFER's findings was that Oil-for-Food riches had positioned Saddam to massively ramp up chemical-weapons production in a matter of months. This has already inspired Rep. Joe Barton, who heads one of the assorted congressional inquiries into Oil-for-Food, to write to Annan, demanding further information. "The notion that the United Nations allowed the oil-for-food program to become an oil-for-death program is troublesome, to say the least," wrote Barton. He added, "Given Mr. DUELFER's findings, we now ask for your personal involvement in the expeditious discovery and public release of any information in possession of the United Nations related to the diversion of oil-for-food funding into Iraqi chemical weapons programs.

Annan's office has not been answering questions in recent months on Oil-for-Food. The U.N. deflects all such issues to its own self-investigation, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — who has continued Annan's practice of keeping secret even such basic information as who bought how much bargain-priced oil from Saddam, and who has deferred all question-answering of substance until he delivers his report, maybe sometime next year.

The standard U.N. defense, offered up periodically by Annan and his subordinates since Annan finally conceded this past March that there had been, perhaps, quite a lot of "wrong-doing," is that Oil-for-Food performed as well as possible under difficult circumstances. A little corruption, we are given to understand, can creep into even the loftiest humanitarian endeavors.

This was not simply a little corruption, however. And it was not vague, and it was not faceless, and it was anything but benign. The DUELFER report takes us right into the caverns of corruption, political rot, arms traffic, and U.N. complicity that under cover of a relief operation was allowing Saddam to to prosper. As we begin to absorb the details, the very least Kofi Annan can contribute is to pursue — with the same kind of zeal he brought to expanding Oil-for-Food — a campaign for the kind of U.N. transparency that should have been the first line of defense against this monstrous travesty ever happening in the first place.

— Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/rosett/rosett200410072250.asp