Oil-for-Food: The Real Story

October 8th, 2005 at 13:39 Björn Hallberg

Here is a story not picked up by the corporate media.

GPF – The Volcker Committee’s investigations into the UN Oil-for-Food Programme have not revealed endemic UN corruption, as many conservatives and UN-critics claim. Rather, the program’s failures stem from Security Council member states – particularly the US and UK – and their hurried efforts to implement an ill-conceived program in the wake of economic sanctions and the first Gulf War. Furthermore, the bulk of illicit revenues came from smuggling, rather than kickbacks and bribes, involving Saddam Hussein’s government, neighboring states, and private corporations, which the UN Secretariat was neither involved with nor responsible for monitoring.

So, in a month’s time we’ll have the eighth and final report of the Volcker Committee and an overview of the real sanctions busters and hopefully the people supporting them. Not that one would care ordinarily, but since certain people have gone out of their way to discredit the UN, one can only hope the comeback will be catastrophic for those same people.

Entry 271 filed under: Middle East. This entry was posted 4 years, 9 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.