Tuesday, March 29, 2005

What Faux News won't tell you about the UN report

Five points:
The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which took over responsibility for Iraqi oil revenues following the invasion, can no longer account for $8.8 billion of Iraqi oil money – twice the amount Saddam Hussein was thought to have gained from oil-for-food kickbacks.

[...]

The Bush administration dropped the ball on stopping the corruption (not once, but dozens of times). U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte “had the power to veto all sales of Iraqi oil and all Iraqi purchases of goods financed with oil-for-food revenues,” and failed to do so despite U.N. administrators identifying at least 70 cases for potential over-pricing of oil between 2001 and 2002.

For the other three points, check this Think Progress post.

Oh yeah, and there's this...

October 16, 2004—

[...]

[T]he one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn't identified in Duelfer's report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Dick Cheney. Halliburton and its subsidiaries were one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000 by skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil. [...] Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq was skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program thanks to companies like Halliburton and former executives such as Cheney.
  Online Journal article

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