Plunder Down Under
Australia shows how a real Oil-for-Food investigation is done.
By Claudia Rosett
National Review Online
November 28, 2006
At United Nations headquarters, Secretary General Kofi Annan likes to imply that the Oil-for-Food era is over (“If there was a scandal” was his locution earlier this year). But Down Under, that landmark U.N. scam is right now all over the headlines. On Monday, Australia’s Cole commission released the findings of its year-long inquiry into some $220 million in kickbacks allegedly paid by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) to Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime under Oil-for-Food.
In a nutshell, the inquiry has cleared the Howard government, but recommends pursuing possible criminal charges against a dozen individuals, eleven of them connected with AWB. Delving deeper into the report promises to be interesting. It runs to five volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages — freighted with such Oil-for-Food-isms as arrangements to funnel money through “a Liechtenstein company with a Chinese name.”
But some lessons are clear already. For starters, the Cole inquiry has set a standard of clarity and transparency that the U.N. itself has yet to adopt — and shows no signs of doing so. The Cole commission conducted public hearings, and appears to have posted the vital underlying documents in full on the web. The interviews of the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, chaired by Paul Volcker, were all done in secret, with snippets released at the sole discretion of Volcker and his team. And although Volcker’s $35 million inquiry — the only investigation with full access to the U.N. itself — went to the trouble of amassing an archive of some 12 million pages, much of that digitally searchable, Volcker never released many of the vital underlying documents. He now appears poised to hand the trove back at the end of next month to the same U.N. where Annan’s former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, spent months shredding executive office papers potentially relevant to the investigation.
The Cole report exemplifies why Volcker’s archives need to be delivered into the public domain — or at the very least, entrusted to authorities with a less glaring conflict of interest in handling any potentially damning information not yet disclosed. Cole’s findings, which in the AWB case go well beyond the Volcker report, are presented in a style so clear and direct that one might infer the investigators genuinely wish to communicate to the public the full extent of their discoveries. That’s quite a contrast with the reports released last year by Volcker’s committee — also totaling well over 2,000 pages. These included loads of horrifying detail, but encased it in so much verbal bubble wrap that the welter of dropped leads, unanswered questions, omitted names and gross underestimates of graft escaped wide notice. Volcker’s inquiry, for example, deep in Volume IV of its Sept. 7, 2005, report noted receiving “numerous allegations of corrupt behavior and practices” including “bid-rigging, conflicts of interest, bribery, theft, nepotism and sexual harassment” among U.N. agency staff working in Iraq, but named not a single individual involved. Cole’s commission has looked into the dealings of one large company, and named 12.
Click here for the full story.
Senator Tom Coburn
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security
340 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-2254 Fax: 202-228-3796
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