U.N. Sues U.S.

You all know the story of Oil-for-Food, right? The U.N. took over the sales of around $65 billion* worth of Iraqi oil over the period of a decade, and in turn provided food and medicine for the Iraqi people... Oh, and also provided palaces and luxury goods for Saddam Hussein and enormous kickbacks for everyone involved. Billions of dollars are unaccounted for.

Fast forward: The U.N. appointed an independent investigative committee to clear its name. Two of the senior investigators recently resigned in protest against the way the investigation was being run, and one of them, Robert Parton, turned over several boxes of documents to the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee in response to a Congressional subpoena.

Well, guess what? The U.N. - in the shape of chief investigator Paul Volcker - has filed a law suit to force Congress to return the documents.

The complaint said that the documents taken by Parton would damage the ability of the committee to complete its work and "potentially places at risk the lives of individuals who have cooperated" with the IIC.

Now that raises this niggling little question in my mind: The interim reports filed by Volcker have not presented any clear case for corruption - rather the reverse. Yet he claims that the evidence upon which he based those reports would put lives at risk if made public.

Why, exactly, Mr Volcker? What is it in those papers that is so damaging that it would lead to murder? And why isn't it present in your own reports?

A decade ago, I considered to US out of UN, UN out of US types to be part of the lunatic fringe. Today, I think they don't go nearly far enough.

(via comments on Roger L. Simon's blog)

* Originally I wrote $110 billion here, but that's incorrect. The $110 billion figure represents the sum of oil sales and aid contracts. Of course, with oil sales of $65 billion, there should be $65 billion in aid contracts, for a total of $130 billion... Leaving $20 billion to account for. The U.N. earned a 2% commission on the oil sales - around $1.4 billion - and there were other legitimate disbursements, but there is still a huge amount of money missing. And that doesn't even account for the kickbacks, which are included in the $110 billion worth of sales and contracts.

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