Oil for Food and Al Qaeda
Wretchard (UPDATE - spelling correction - thanks Al!) at the Belmont Club has been on a roll this last week regarding the situation in Iraq. Very interesting reading.
Today though,
he links to an article by
Claudia Rossett who has been doing an excellent job of ferreting out the corruption behind the UN Oil-For-Food program. (Read more
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here)
In her current article, Ms. Rossett talks about:
bq. As the Oil-for-Food program actually worked, however, the United Nations let Saddam choose his own business partners. The world body also kept secret the details of those contracts and the identities of the contractors, and it let Saddam graft at least $4.4 billion out of the program through manipulated contract prices, by estimates of the U.S. General Accountability Office.
bq. Saddam's standard scam was to underprice oil sales and overpay for relief supplies, thus generating fat profits for his business partners. Many of those contractors would kick back part of the take to Saddam's regime — or divert it to whatever uses Saddam might fancy. By various accounts, those uses ranged from building palaces to buying arms to supplying Saddam's sadistic son Uday with equipment for torturing Iraqi athletes.
bq. One of the big questions is whether any of the money skimmed from Oil-for-Food also slopped into terrorist-financing ventures such as MIGA.
Wretchard then goes on with:
bq. The circumstantial evidence is pretty damning. Rossett describes MIGA as a "terrorist chamber of commerce". Its founder and president, Ahmed Idris Nasreddin was on a watchlist of suspected Al-Qaeda financiers, as was his business partner Youssef Nada. Another MIGA founder, who remains unindicted still runs the far-flung Hayel Saeed Anam Group of Companies (HSA) which continues to operate worldwide. The HSA was also a large player in the Oil for Food Program and handled at least $400 million in transactions for the former dictator.
He then proceeds to do an excellent country by country analysis of the mess.
Read it and get that nice fuzzy warm feeling about the United Nations and all the good they do in the world. Arrrrggghhhhh...
Posted by DaveH at September 19, 2004 7:31 PM