# More UN oil for food



## racer66 (Oct 6, 2003)

:eyeroll: :sniper: NEW YORK - Investigators into the Oil-for-Food scandal at the United Nations are exploring a chilling possibility, that the U.N. humanitarian program may have funded terrorists - including possibly Al Qaeda.

Juan Zarate (search), the assistant Treasury secretary in the newly formed Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said the U.S. government is "very concerned" about what happened with the Oil-for-Food program that he said "provided [former Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein a vehicle &#8230; to do exactly what he wanted to do."

"The problem though is complicated," Zarate said. "There's a wide source of potential funding for groups who want to do us harm."

[Editor's Note: This is one in a series of articles about the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Check back tomorrow for the final installment.]

One thing Saddam wanted to do was buy weapons to use against the United States, Zarate said. Selling arms to Saddam was illegal under U.N. sanctions in place after the first Gulf War ended in 1991 but Oil-for-Food (search), which began in late 1996, gave him the money - and the network to skirt the ban.

Case in point: the Al Wasel and Babel General Trading Company (search), which was established in 1999 in the United Arab Emirates to do business under the Oil-for-Food program.

FOX News has obtained a secret U.N. database, which shows that in 2000 and 2001 alone that company earned more than $126 million dollars selling Saddam everything from detergent to teak and white plywood.

Zarate said that Al Wasel and Babel was secretly controlled, in part, by Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim Al-Azzawi - Saddam's deputy prime minister and finance minister. Al-Azzawi - who would become the "eight of diamonds" in the deck of cards issued by the U.S. military following the downfall of Saddam's regime in 2003 - ordered the company to collect illegal kickbacks from other Oil-for-Food suppliers, Zarate said.

Some of the money went to buy a missile system - specifically, a $174 million Russian anti-aircraft missile system that could shoot down American and British pilots then patrolling Iraqi "no fly" zones.

"He used Al Wasel and Babel &#8230; to try to procure weapons," Zarate said, noting that U.S. Customs agents foiled the deal.

But Al Wasel and Babel kept on doing business with Oil-for-Food until this past April. That's when the U.S. Treasury Department officially identified it as a front company for Saddam.

FOX News has received no reply from Al Wasel and Babel or its parent company, the Lootah Group of companies, about the accusations it was secretly controlled by Saddam.

Treasury officials have already identified 11 front companies and nearly 200 Iraqi-controlled firms that they suspect were part of Saddam's secret and illegal network. And they say that's only the tip of the iceberg.

"One of our grave concerns is that the money &#8230; is still available to those who want to do us harm in Iraq," Zarate said.

Another possibility is that Oil-for-Food money ended up in the hands of terrorists looking to strike in the United States - particularly Al Qaeda (search). It's something to think about in light of revelations in the report by the commission appointed to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, which dispels the myth that Usama bin Laden financed Al Qaeda with a $300 million personal fortune.

The report says bin Laden had nowhere near the money to fund Al Qaeda's $30-million-a-year budget.

So where did Al Qaeda get the money?

The Sept. 11 commission doesn't know. It can only point to an undefined "loose affiliation of financial institutions, businesses and wealthy individuals who supported extremist Islamic activities."

Could some of these also be the ones helping Saddam scam Oil-for-Food?

The Sept. 11 report reveals that Iraq and Al Qaeda started communicating after the United States kicked Saddam out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War in 1991. Bin Laden "himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer" in Sudan in 1994 or 1995, the report says.

In 1996, the report says that bin Laden began having serious money problems that required him to cut back spending. One key bin Laden aide defected because he was only getting paid $500 a month.

Bin Laden sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime in 1997, offering some cooperation. The next year, two Al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence, and an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden.

It was also in 1998 that Al Qaeda bombed two American embassies in Africa - after bin Laden called "for the murder of any American, anywhere on Earth." Suddenly, according to the Sept. 11 report, "Bin Laden had become the rich man of the jihad movement."

One more thing about 1998: that was the year the Oil-for-Food program really started pumping billions into Saddam's secret accounts, according to U.N. figures.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a FOX News contributor working on Oil-for-Food stories, said the Sept. 11 commission never looked at Oil-for-Food records.

"Someone probably needs to take up the records on the Oil-for-Food end and trace it further forward," Rosett said.

One place investigators might want to explore is a sprawling, family owned conglomerate based in Yemen called Hayel Saeed Anam. According to a FOX News computer analysis of the Oil-for-Food database, it did more than $286 million worth of business with Saddam between January 1997 and February 2001 alone.

One of the directors of Hayel Saeed Anam is Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed.

FOX News has found with the help of a specialized international private investigation firm and Arabic handwriting experts that Saeed is a founder of a company called MIGA - Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber - registered in Lugano, Italy.

The Treasury Department's Zarate knows MIGA well. He described it as "another very good example of a front company used as a shell to hide and move money." More than that, MIGA was designated in 2002 by the United States and the United Nations as "belonging to or associated with" Al Qaeda.

For more about MIGA, click here.

FOX News attempted to contact the founder and chairman of the Hayel Saeed Anam group about MIGA, Oil-for-Food and Al Qaeda. Plus, FOX News sought to contact Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed. But FOX News received no reply.

Zarate would not comment on FOX News' findings because he said his responsibility was to protect potentially sensitive information.

But Rep. Christopher Shays (search), a Connecticut Republican who is heading up an Oil-for-Food investigation in the House, said he is certain terrorists somewhere benefited from the program.

"Did this money go to terrorists? I don't think it went to the American Beauty Pageant," Shays said. "Did it go to terrorists? I think you can be absolutely certain it went to terrorists."


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Wall Street Journal about the corrupt UN and Kofi the crook! :eyeroll:

THE REAL WORLD

Come Clean, Kofi
The U.N. secretary-general ducks responsibilty for the Oil for Food scam.

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 12:01 a.m.

*With estimates soaring of graft and fraud under the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq, we are hearing a lot about the need to "get to the bottom" of this scandal, the biggest ever to hit the U.N. To get to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top--where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides.*
That violates all sorts of taboos. But so, one might suppose, does a United Nations that allowed Saddam Hussein to embezzle at least $21.3 billion in oil money during 12 years, with the great bulk of that sum--a staggering $17.3 billion--pilfered between 1997-2003, on Mr. Annan's watch.

These are the record-breaking new estimates released Monday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,* whose staffers, despite Mr. Annan's refusal to cooperate*, have spent the past seven months voyaging deep into the muck of Oil for Food. At a hearing Monday, these investigators surfaced to tell us the theft and fraud under Oil for Food was at least twice as bad as earlier reports had suggested, and that all this is just a preview of yet more appalling disclosures they expect to release early next year. Sen. Norm Coleman, the subcommittee's chairman, underscored the urgency of such investigations, noting not only that the size of the fraud "is staggering," but that some of Saddam's vast illicit stash might right now be funding terrorists and costing American lives.

Mr. Annan, by contrast, seems to inhabit a different universe--one in which the chief problem lies not in the U.N.'s complicity, including his own, in the biggest fraud in the history of humanitarian relief, but rather in the attempts to shine any light on all that sleaze. In Annan Land, there was earlier this year no need for any probe into Oil for Food; and even now there is no need for any investigating beyond the U.N.'s own "independent inquiry" into itself, led by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, required to funnel its findings first through Mr. Annan, funded to the tune of $30 million out of one of the old Oil for Food accounts it is supposed to be investigating, and not planning to clock in with any specific results until sometime next summer.

In the spirit of shooting the messenger, Mr. Annan has complained often in recent months about criticism of Oil for Food, denouncing it as a "campaign" that has "hurt the U.N." Monday's Oil for Food hearing evoked from Mr. Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, the comment that Mr. Annan feels he has been "misjudged by certain media" and that Mr. Annan is "not being obstructionist" in his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigators. We are given to understand that Mr. Annan would help if he could, but his job entails so many over-riding responsibilities.

OK, except that when it comes to Oil for Food, Mr. Annan has labored hard in recent months to disavow his own large role and responsibilities. From both Mr. Annan and the entourage of U.N. speechwriters and spokesman who report to him have come a long series of disclaimers and protests, eye-catching less for what they tell us than for what they leave out.

Just last week, we had Mr. Annan's director of communications, Edward Mortimer, asserting in a letter to The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Annan was "not involved" in designing Oil for Food. Technically, it may be correct that Mr. Annan did not actually seal the original deal. But Mr. Annan's own official U.N. biography states that before becoming secretary-general, he "led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid"--and that implies a certain familiarity with the origins of Oil for Food.
Once Mr. Annan became secretary-general, he lost little time in getting deeply involved with Oil for Food. In October 1997, just 10 months into the job, he transformed what had begun as an ad hoc, temporary relief measure into the Office of the Iraq Program, an entrenched U.N. department, which reported to him directly--and was eliminated only after the U.S.-led coalition, against Mr. Annan's wishes, deposed Saddam. To run Oil for Food, Mr. Annan picked Benon Sevan (now alleged to have received oil money from Saddam, which he denies) and kept him there until the program ended about six years later.

Mr. Annan's reorganization of Oil for Food meant a nontrivial change in the trajectory of the program. All the signs are that Saddam immediately took the cue that he could now start gaming the program with impunity--and Mr. Annan did not prove him wrong. Within the month, Saddam had created the first crisis over the U.N. weapons inspectors, who were supposed to be part of the sanctions and Oil for Food package. Mr. Annan's response was not to throttle back on Oil for Food but to go before the Security Council a few months later and urge that Baghdad be allowed to import oil equipment along with the food and medicine to which the program had been initially limited. This set the stage for the ensuing burst in Saddam's oil production, kickbacks, surcharges and smuggling.

Mr. Annan then flew to Baghdad for a private powwow with Saddam and returned to declare that this was a man he could do business with. The weapons inspectors returned to Iraq for a short spell, but by the end of 1998, Saddam had evicted them for the next four years. Mr. Annan, however, went right on doing business. And big business it was, however humanitarian in name. Under the Oil for Food deal, Mr. Annan's Secretariat pulled in a 2.2% commission on Saddam's oil sales, totaling a whopping $1.4 billion over the life of the program, to cover the costs of supervising Saddam. Yet somehow the Secretariat never found the funding to fully meter oil shipments, ensure full inspections of all goods entering Iraq, or catch the pricing scams that by the new estimates of Senate investigators let Saddam rake in $4.4 billion in kickbacks on relief contracts.

Mr. Annan and his aides would also have us believe that Oil for Food had nothing to do with Saddam's smuggling of oil--which generated the lion's share of his illicit income. But it was only after Oil for Food geared up that Saddam's oil smuggling really took off, totaling $13.6 billion during his entire 12 years between wars, but with more than two-thirds of that--an estimated $9.7 billion--earned during the era of Oil for Food. Those were precisely the years in which Mr. Annan repeatedly went to bat to enable Saddam, under Oil for Food, to import the equipment to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure, whence came all that smuggled oil.

Transparency from the start might have flagged the world and stopped the scams as things turned deeply rotten under Oil for Food. But Mr. Annan's policy to this day has been secrecy. On Monday, Sen. Coleman summed up his subcommittee's efforts to get at the truth, as having required so far, eight subpoenas, 13 chairman's letters, "numerous interviews with key participants, and receipt of over a million pages of evidence" to begin to understand "the behind-the-scenes machinations of the participants in the Oil for Food program."

"Participants" are generally understood to have been Saddam's chosen contractors. But we need to recognize that one of the biggest of those contractors was, in effect, the U.N. itself. As Oil for Food was not only designed but expanded, embellished upon and run for more than six years under Mr. Annan's stewardship, it became not so much a supervisory operation, *but a business deal with Saddam*, in which the U.N. in effect provided money laundering services, the Secretariat collected a percentage fee from Saddam--and somewhere in there, between the kickbacks, surcharges, importation of oil equipment and smuggling out of oil, they jointly ran a storefront relief operation.

Who at the U.N. took illicit money from Saddam--if, indeed, anyone did--is an important question, and worth pursuing. But so is the matter of who covered up for Saddam; who pushed to continue and expand a program so derelict that it failed to nab more than $17 billion in illicit deals, and so secretive that investigators have spent much of the past year trying simply to get their hands on information the U.N. should have made public at the time. It is worth asking whose welfare was enhanced, whose domain was expanded, whose coffers filled with $1.4 billion delivered as a percentage cut of Saddam's oil revenues--and who has failed to this day to take on board the thumping lessons about the need for transparency at the U.N. *That would be Mr. Annan*. :sniper: He is not protecting the U.N. At great cost to whatever noble aspirations the U.N. once had, and to all societies that value integrity over Potemkin institutions, *he is protecting himself. *Ms. Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.


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## rap (Mar 26, 2002)

i can't believe we are the only ones upset about this deal.... i recently saw kofi anan received a standing ovation by the general assembly over this issue... :eyeroll: :eyeroll:


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## southdakbearfan (Oct 11, 2004)

Of course he recieved a standing ovasion, the U.N. has become a vehicle for tyrant lead dictatorships to chip away at the very foundation of the U.S.A!

The United States should drop its charter from the U.N. and see whats happens, then set up a real organization again to actually do what it is intended to do, spread freedom and help to the countries that need from the countries that can afford to do it. Not let the little no-brain dictators and their stool pigeon Kofi Anon try to legislate law and order, in their eyes, to the United States.


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## mr.trooper (Aug 3, 2004)

What i think is so great is that these are some of the nations that say we are in Iraq to steal oil...yet they are the ones running this crooked program. :roll:


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