The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the United Nations are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll.
“The major source of external financial resources to the Iraqi regime,” he reported, “resulted from sanctions violations outside the [oil-for-food] programme’s framework.” These violations consisted of “illicit sales” of oil by the Iraqi regime to Turkey and Jordan. The members of the UN security council, including the United States, knew about them but did nothing. “United States law requires that assistance programmes to countries in violation of UN sanctions be ended unless continuation is determined to be in the national interest. Such determinations were provided by successive United States administrations.”
Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general’s job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn’t. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55 000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.
The authority, the inspector general found, was “burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management”. This is kind. Other investigations suggest that it was also burdened by false accounting, fraud and corruption.
Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC’s File on Four programme that officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300 000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800-million was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1,4-billion was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has not been seen since.
Auditors at the Pentagon, for example, allege that, in the course of just one contract, a subsidiary of Halliburton overcharged it for imported fuel by $61-million. This appears to have been officially sanctioned.
What makes all this so serious is that more than half the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition’s sales of oil. If you think the UN’s oil-for-food programme was leaky, take a look at the CPA’s oil-for-reconstruction scheme. Throughout the entire period of CPA rule, there was no metering of the oil passing through Iraq’s pipelines, which means that there was no way of telling how much of the country’s wealth the authority was extracting, or whether it was paying a fair price for it. The CPA, according to the international monitoring body charged with auditing it, was also “unable to estimate the amount of petroleum … that was smuggled”.
The authority was plainly breaching UN resolutions. As Christian Aid points out, the CPA’s distribution of Iraq’s money was supposed to have been subject to international oversight from the beginning. But no auditors were appointed until April 2004 - just two months before the CPA’s mandate ran out. Even then, they had no power to hold it to account or even to ask it to cooperate. But enough information leaked out to suggest that $500-million of Iraqi oil money might have been “diverted” (a polite word for nicked) to help pay for the military occupation.
I hope that Messrs Hyde and Coleman won’t stop asking whether Iraqi oil money has been properly spent. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if their agreeable silence persists.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=197101&area=/insight/insight__international/
It was said in the beginning and its all coming out now the amerikkkans went to Iraq to abuse and loot it and build more bases to colonise other nations liberation is another lie just like WMDs
Ak47 Why do you hate U.S.A so much? We are good friendly people. We love humanity and like people to taste freedom and live their lives the way free people live.