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| UN Spokesman Answers Questoins About Food-For-Oil Investigations |
| 2004-11-18 |
| Excerpts from Following a near-verbatim transcript of the November 17 briefing by Fred Eckhard, Spokesman for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Question: I heard on television news this morning that Saddam Hussein, with the "oil-for-food" programme, they made it a whole case where he had hoodwinked the United Nations and got all this money. And he used it to pay suicide bombers to bomb Israel. And there was going to be a congressional investigation and the UN said no, it doesn't look good for the UN. Do you have a comment? Spokesman: There were press accounts that Saddam Hussein had paid [compensation to] the families of suicide bombers but to our knowledge this matter was never taken up by the Security Council's 661 Committee on Iraqi sanctions. As you may know, there were hearings in Washington on the oil-for-food programme, or more broadly, on Saddam Hussein and the skimming of oil money for a variety of purposes, that took place on Monday in the Senate and will take place this afternoon on the House side. In the Senate hearings, there was a revelation on Monday that the amount of money that had been diverted totalled $21.3 billion. Senator Levin, one of the two co-chairs holding those meetings, pointed out that a substantial portion of this money pre-dated the oil-for-food programme so this is not all money that is linked to the oil-for-food programme. As for the oil-for-food money, none of it was to have gotten into Saddam's hands. It was to go into a UN escrow account to be used for meeting the humanitarian needs of all Iraqis. My last comment would be just to recall what the Secretary-General said to the Security Council in March 2001: that oil money deposited in any other account, besides the UN escrow account, was illegal and a breach of sanctions. So the whole purpose of the Volcker investigation is to find out the extent of that breach, and who was responsible. .... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 That does it. Get us out of the UN now! kick them out and shoot all them that will not leave New York. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2004-11-18 11:58:56 PM |