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Oil-for-food hypocrisy by the Bushies

<![CDATA[The Financial Times, looking into the oil-for-food scandal that the Bush Administration has used to condemn the United Nations, found the Bush Administration not only new about the biggest violations, but willfully ignored them. When? Just two months before the invasion in the midst of the showdown with Saddam. Here is the summary of the […]

<![CDATA[The Financial Times, looking into the oil-for-food scandal that the Bush Administration has used to condemn the United Nations, found the Bush Administration not only new about the biggest violations, but willfully ignored them. When? Just two months before the invasion in the midst of the showdown with Saddam. Here is the summary of the findings from the article:

… a joint investigation by the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily, shows that the single largest and boldest smuggling operation in the oil-for-food programme was conducted with the knowledge of the US government.

“Although the financial beneficiaries were Iraqis and Jordanians, the fact remains that the US government participated in a major conspiracy that violated sanctions and enriched Saddam’s cronies,” a former UN official said. “That is exactly what many in the US are now accusing other countries of having done. I think it’s pretty ironic.”

Overall, the operation involved 14 tankers engaged by a Jordanian entity to load at least 7m barrels of oil for a total of no less than $150m (€113m) of illegal profits. About another $50m went to Mr Hussein’s cronies.

In February 2003, when US media first published reports of this smuggling effort, then attributed exclusively to the Iraqis, the US mission to the UN condemned it as “immoral”.

However, FT/Il Sole have evidence that US and UK missions to the UN were informed of the smuggling while it was happening and that they reported it to their respective governments, to no avail.

Oil traders were told informally that the US let the tankers go because Amman needed oil to build up its strategic reserves in expectation of the Iraq war.

Last week Paul Volcker, head of the independent commission created by the UN to investigate failures in the oil-for-food programme, confirmed that Washington allowed violations of the oil sanctions by Jordan in recognition of its national interests.



For those of you on the right who may want to condemn
Paul Volcker as a tool of the United Nations, remember that he was the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and has no reason to bash the United States.]]>