From the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com. Free, but registration req'd, so here's the whole thing. Who needs Paul Volker's report, when Claudia has got the whole thing taped? More facinating stuff, clearly analyzed and cleanly laid out for the reader.
Let's be honest. Along with United Nations secrecy, Saddam Hussein's perfidy, and the general coyness of the bribed, one of the big obstacles to getting to the bottom of the Oil for Food scandal is the sheer horror of actually having to read the reams of U.N. documents tied to the program--on the occasions when documents do turn up. It's a step forward that on Sunday Paul Volcker's U.N.-approved inquiry finally released the program's 55 secret internal audits, which Congress and others had been requesting for months. But among those who have been asking, in some cases for years, to see such documents and are now slogging across the acres of bureaucratese therein, I dare say there's a certain feeling of "be careful what you wish for." Beyond the highlights already reported, including waste, abuse and maladministration costing hundreds of millions, maybe billions, in money that belonged to the people of Iraq, it may take a while before the ramifications have been fully explored. Let us pluck from the stack, however, one item that deserves especially urgent attention, because it involves an $18.8 billion flow consisting largely of Oil for Food funding, which until now, in all its opaque complexity, has too much escaped notice. Among the audits just released by Mr. Volcker are 19 that shed some light on yet another troubling trail in the labyrinth that was the Oil for Food program. That trail belongs to the U.N. Compensation Commission. Based in Geneva and set up in 1991 to channel some of Iraq's money into compensation for the victims of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the UNCC was folded into Oil for Food when that relief program swung into operation in late 1996. Under Oil for Food, Saddam was allowed, under U.N. supervision, to sell oil in order to buy humanitarian aid for Iraqis. A percentage of those oil earnings was hived off for the UNCC. It was Oil for Food, with oil sales totaling some $65 billion, that produced the bulk of the money disbursed to date by the UNCC, which got 30% of Saddam's U.N.-approved oil revenues through 2000; and 25% thereafter, until the fall of Saddam in March, 2003 put an end to the bonanza.
That's how it happened that the UNCC to date has dispensed $18.8 billion. To give some sense of scale, that's more than three times the donations pledged so far to help tsunami victims. In dealing with the tsunami money, the U.N. has been promising careful and open handling, though it is not obvious that there has yet been any alteration to the U.N. system deep enough to ensure even that will happen. But in the UNCC's case, there was no such pledge of transparent handling. The commission followed the usual Oil for Food practice of keeping confidential many of the details of its decisions, as well as the names of many of those receiving the money.