Iraqi Oil for Food... and Al Queda?

[Occhidiangela]

and is now under investigation in the United States on suspicion of having funneled money to Al Qaeda from Islamic charities based in Herndon, Va.

I went to Herndon High School, about 10 miles from Dulless International Airport, about 24 miles as the crow flies from Washington DC.

So, looks like I need to go home and do a little "Walking Tall" action. Where's that big stick I was carrying the other day, as I walked softly down the path . . .

Occhi

PS: and this part

HSA is unquestionably a company involved in legitimate business. But given the involvement of Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed, it is striking that between 1996 and 2003, while the United Nations ran its oil-for-food relief program in Iraq, the HSA Group — via U.N.-approved oil-for-food contracts — sold at least $400 million worth of goods to Saddam.  That might be unremarkable, had the United Nations ran oil-for-food with enough integrity and transparency to prevent Saddam and many of his business partners from plundering oil earnings meant to help the people of Iraq. The original United Nations plan was to let Saddam sell oil solely to buy humanitarian goods such as food and medicine, with the U.N. Secretariat collecting a 2.2 percent commission on Saddam's oil sales to supervise the integrity of this process.

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. 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.  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.

Yet another crack in the credibility of the UN. Not a good thing.