Those Bastards at the UN

Kofi Annan must resign! This oil-for-food scandal has gone on long enough! He was in charge; it happened on his watch! He's either complicit in this terrible criminal offence, or he is wildly incompetent. Either way he MUST step down!!

(article)

But 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.

These unbelievable bastards at the UN have to... uh... come again?

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.

Oh yeah, right. I believe that. What possible motive would the glorious US of A have to participate in this unthinkable embezzling scheme? We're the moral center of the universe! We only do what is righteous and true! A shining paladin of justice!

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.

Ah... The war, eh? Well, YES, of COURSE the war! We needed to protect our children from that madman Saddam and his huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction! Any difficult choices we had to make were worth it; we were all on the verge of extinction!

(article)

Mr. Duelfer issued a comprehensive report last fall that acknowledged that Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990's, years before the American invasion of 2003. But Mr. Duelfer returned to Iraq for further investigations after that report was issued. In an article in its Wednesday issue, The Washington Post reported that he had ended that work in late December.

The intelligence official said that Mr. Duelfer was still likely to issue several small additional statements on his findings, but that none would contradict the central conclusions that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons at the time of the American invasion.

Go fuck yourself.