Did someone say something about a "global test"?

Saddam Got $21 Bln from UN Oil Program -U.S. Panel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's regime reaped over $21 billion from kickbacks and smuggling before and during the now-defunct U.N. oil-for-food program, twice as much as previous estimates, according to a U.S. Senate probe on Monday.

The monies flowed between 1991 and 2003 through oil surcharges, kickbacks on civilian goods and smuggling directly to willing governments, Senate investigators said at a hearing.

"How was the world so blind to this massive amount of influence-peddling?" asked Republican Sen. Norm Coleman (news, bio, voting record), head of the investigations subcommittee.

Coleman made public more documents he said were evidence of bigger kickbacks and payments than what was previously known, including 2003 data previously not reviewed.

The new Senate figure is about double the amount estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which had pegged it at $10.1 billion. Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq (news - web sites), had estimated about the same amount based on Iraqi documents, with $2 billion through the U.N. program and $8 billion in smuggling by road or sea or in direct illegal agreements with governments.

The oil-for-food program began in December 1996 to alleviate the impact on ordinary Iraqis of sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The U.N. Security Council allowed Iraq to sell oil and buy food, medicine and other goods and let Baghdad draw up its own contracts.

This left room for abuse in the $64 billion program, administered by the United Nations (news - web sites) and monitored by a U.N. Security Council panel, including the United States, according to investigators.

Oil smuggling alone netted Saddam's regime about $9.7 billion, with other funds flowing from switching substandard goods with top-grade ones, as well as exploiting food and medicine shipments to the Kurds in Iraq's north.

Panel investigators also echoed the findings by Duelfer, head of the CIA (news - web sites)-led Iraq Survey Group, that Saddam's regime gave lucrative contracts to buy Iraqi oil to high-ranking officials in Russia, France and other nations.

On the list of 270 individuals, businesses and political parties was the head of the U.N. oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, who has vigorously denied the charges.

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The charges against Botox John by the SwiftVets and POW's were only the second most ignored story of the past election season. The inexplicable lack of interest in the Oil-For-Food swindle is just another shovel of dirt on the grave of the "Old Media".

One can only imagine the screaming headlines and "60 Minutes" segments that would have been produced had the culprit been, say Halliburton or Enron. But this is far worse than a corporate scandal, inasmuch as it goes to the very legitimacy of the institution charged with refereeing disputes among nations, and the duplicitousness and corruption of those some in this country would reach out to as "allies".

We understand the need for the blackout of this story, which initially came to our attention with the Duelfer Report, prior to the election: to bring this story to light would have cut John Kerry-Heinz's campaign off at the knees. His "global test" would have been unmasked as the insipid and naive dottiness us Red State morons always knew it to be.

Thankfully, Providence spared us in the end, and the "global test" will take its rightful place on the dung heap of discredited flapdoodle.

We can only hope the UN follows.