Inquiry blasts oil-for-food program

Diplomat accused of program breach

Is Sevan being made a scapegoat by the UN investigation?

How far up do the Oil-for-Food problems go?

Are you happy with the progress on the investigation so far?

Is Sevan being made a scapegoat by the UN investigation?

Happens all the time. Look at the soldiers being convicted for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

How many of them claim they were following orders?

I don't see any generals in the docks.

How far up do the Oil-for-Food problems go?

I believe the United States knew well beforehand that Iraq's oil sales to countries like Turkey and Jordan had been going on for a long time and that this was known inside the United Nations.

CNN has reported that unclassified State Department documents sent to congressional committees with oversight of U.S. foreign policy prove that the U.S. considered these sales crucial to the national interest.

Jordan was pivotal to the Clinton and Bush administrations. Because its late King Hussein bin Talal was trying to forge a peace beween the Israelis and the Palestians, both Clinton and Bush winked at his country's purchase of Iraqi oil.

After 9-11, Turkey emerged as major guarantor of Iraqi acquiesence and the U.S. could ill afford to annoy its NATO ally.

So nothing was said when Ankara kept buying oil from Baghdad.

The real truth is only beginning to seep out.

But since the U.S. media is so closely aligned with the Bush administration, which wants to desperately destroy Annan Kofi's credibility, it will keep the drumbeat that it is the fault of the U.N. and the U.N. alone alive.

Are you happy with the progress on the investigation so far?

It's a B.S. probe, much like the whitewash that the 9-11 Commission bestowed on the Bush administration.

I believe that Sevan is a scapegoat. I don't expect true accountability here anyway and never did. I am slightly heartened to see some semblance of outrage (even if the outrage is feigned), and finally real attention brought to this issue. I am hoping that measures will be set up to ensure this doesn't happen again.



There is nothing surprising about Jordan's trade policy with Iraq. Shortly after the first Gulf war, it approached the Security Council and explained its intentions. Iraq owed them an extreme debt, and discounted oil was to be their method of debt payment. This is pretty common knowledge to those who have followed the sanction policy closely through the years. This information was public at the time...and certainly doesn't single the US out in that case, as the UN condoned the trade protocol before the US did.

http://www.jordanembassyus.org/021698003.htm



Furthermore, I'm not certain what you're arguing here. The US "knew" borders were open and oil was being shipped into countries illicitly, therefore our government is part of the scandal? At the very most, you might argue we didn't do enough to prevent it, though I'm not sure how. Should we have sanctioned Turkey, too? We didn't sanction anyone else for illicit buying so why single out Turkey, the most democrat Muslim country in the area? We certainly took the sanctions more seriously than most other countries (with the exception of the UK). As the sanction policy continued over the scope of a decade, fears of Iraq from its neighbors eased, and sympathy for the Iraqi people grew. The United States found it increasingly difficult to persuade ALL regional governments to enforce them. The borders were rather fluid, and everyone knew it.....but of course, oil wasn't the only thing crossing either.