But this isn't a post about Iraq war crimes, so...
Early reports held that several African finance ministers were coming to Wolfowitz' defense with high praise for him. Apparently, there are some who don't quite see it that way.
"Don't try to make Africa his saving grace," Njoki Njoroge Njehu, Executive Director of Nairobi-based Daughters of Mumbi Global Resource Center, told 50 Years is Enough. "The impact of the World Bank's policy impositions of the last 20 years still devastates us every day."[...]
Nita Evele, a Washington-based activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, said, "Corruption and the World Bank, corruption and Paul Wolfowitz: these are not new, and are not limited to his girlfriend. Congolese in the U.S. protested outside the Bank on Saturday – a protest that called for Wolfowitz's resignation. But our initial and overriding purpose was to call attention to the way the World Bank, under Wolfowitz's direction, has facilitated the turning over of our country's vast mineral resources to multinational corporations for a song.
Indeed, that, I believe fulfills the unstated mission of the World Bank.
SAIC, a cauldron of slimy dealing itself (see previous posts), is distancing itself from Wolfowitz, saying that the Defense Department's policy division "directed" SAIC to hire the Combsucker's girlfriend Shaha Riza as a consultant. (Rats in a cage syndrome?)
As to whether WB General Counsel Ana Palacio (whose immediate response to the accusation against Wolfowitz regarding Ms. Riza's outrageous fortune since the Combsucker took over as president was to call for the head of the leaker) can perform an unbiased investigation, several WB staffers think not. I'd say they're probably right, considering that Ms. Palacio is also a Wolfowitz appointee. At any rate, there's a lengthy intranet discussion amongst WB staffers (here in aspx format) with several comments about Palacio and Riza's friendship. One comment from April 10 states:
Ms. Ana Palacio and Ms. Shaha Riza are personal friends, call each other on the cell phone, have dinner regularly, and see each other socially. Should Ms. Palacio be in charge of the investigation? My take is no. I urge the Board to consider the above information, for the credibility of this Institution.
Apparently, the rotten stench of the investigation goes even deeper than Ms. Palacio.
[R]eports are circulating that Williams & Connolly LLP, the law firm World Bank General Counsel Ana Palacio hired to investigate the leak of Board documents to Fox News earlier this year, has close ties to Paul Wolfowitz. "On April 12 staff learned that Robert Barnett, a lawyer at Williams & Connolly LLP, is Paul Wolfowitz's personal lawyer," the blog wolfowitzmustresign has posted.
And finally, amongst the WB staffer comments on the Bank's intranet site, there's this gem:
if the [bank's] president stopped shooting himself in the foot that often...he would not have that many holes in his socks.
on a Wolfowitz Harmonica
- aka a comb
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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