Pacific Views: Oil For Food Coverup

Natasha has the damning details on the Oil For Food Coverup:

US companies were involved, US oversight was involved at every step of the way, and the UN bureaucracy didn't even have the ability to act on their own staff findings, emphasis mine:

... Indeed, an analysis by Michael Pan, a researcher at the Center for American Progress, notes that all the trades in the oil-for-food program had to be approved by a committee of the U.N. Security Council, known as the 661 Committee, on which U.S., British, French, Russian, and Chinese officials sat. They raised no objections, even when U.N. staff flagged 70 separate transactions as potentially suspicious.

"The United States and Britain, along with the other members of the UN Security Council, designed and oversaw the oil-for-food program," wrote Harvard's John G. Ruggie in the International Herald Tribune ("What About the Log in Your Eye, Congress?" December 8, 2004). "The United States alone had 60 professionals review each of the 36,000 contracts awarded—more than twice the size of the UN oil-for-food office's professional staff. America and Britain held up 5,000 contracts, sometimes for months, to ensure that no technology was getting through that Saddam could use for weapons purposes. But they held up none—not a single solitary one—on the grounds of pricing irregularities, even when alerted by UN staff." ...

There's a big scandal here alright, but I don't think it's Kojo Annan's fancy car.

In short: The Bush administration, who's lost billions of dollars to corruption during their supervision of Iraq and couldn't even rescue a major, culturally significant US city from a hurricane they knew was coming, is criticizing the UN for corruption they reported before it happened and suggesting that it's the UN who isn't equipped to manage in a dangerous world.