The so-called "anti-war" crowd has spent two years castigating President Bush for "throwing away world support" by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Since the President named Iraq as one of the "axis of evil" countries in the 2002 State of the Union Address, some people have been working overtime to make him look as though he was using America's military might for personal reasons. They feigned the purest motives; they pretended to hold the moral high ground. 'No Blood for Oil!' was the rallying cry among the masses, many of whom were merely dupes in the ideological fight against America and the Coalition. They told us all they were working for peace, and were only working against war, not against America. Now, at last, we know who they were working for. It turns out that Saddam's oil bribes were paying for Iraqi blood.
ABCNEWS has obtained an extraordinary list that contains the names of prominent people around the world who supported Saddam Hussein's regime and were given oil contracts as a result.
All of the contracts were awarded from late 1997 until the U.S.-led war in March 2003. They were conducted under the aegis of the United Nations' oil-for-food program, which was designed to allow Iraq to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods.
Those documents were found in the Iraqi Ministry of Oil files in Baghdad, and the story was first reported by the Baghdad newspaper al-Mada. Their validity was confirmed by Naseer al-Chaderji, a senior member of Iraq's Governing Council. It is the height of irony that the perfidy of those who opposed the liberation of Iraq should be exposed by the symbol of the freedom that liberation brought: a free press. Just think about that for a second.
Other high-level opposition to the liberation of Iraq included then-Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. Kofi Annan led the group that brokered the oil-for-food program with Iraq under the nose of which all this corruption was taking place. The UN has never allowed an outside audit of the oil-for-food program, under which the United Nations made a 2.2% "administration fee" on every transaction, as Claudia Rosset revealed last year.
Delving into these matters gets tough, because the U.N. shuns transparency. Given that more than $20 billion from the Iraq program is now sitting in U.N. escrow accounts awaiting some combination of Saddam's planning and U.N. processing, one wonders which banks, and which of those countries now taking part in the Iraq debate, might be getting thick slices of Saddam's business. A few years ago, all Oil-for-Food funds were kept at a French bank, Banque Nationale de Paris. More recently, the funds have been diversified among five or six banks, according to U.N. treasurer Suzanne Bishopric. But the U.N. does not permit her to disclose the names or locations of the banks, or details such as interest accrued.
"We don't like to make public where our money is," says Ms. Bishopric. Who audits the program? It's a strictly insider job: The U.N. secretariat, supplemented by a rotating set of member nations, with the task currently delegated to the government of the Philippines.
How much of the world was under Saddam's thumb? The dirty connections seem to never end. Many (though by no means all) of the oil-for-food connections, as well as the oil contract, electronics and weapons connections, lead to France and Russia... America's most vocal detractors and the most difficult opposition to the liberation of Iraq. If you think this is a coincidence, I'd like to sell you some swampland -- I mean, prime development real estate in Florida.
George Galloway, the British minister most adamantly set against Prime Minister Tony Blair's tough stance on Iraq, is on the list as receiving the rights to sell a million barrels of oil for less than the market price. At an average US$.50 profit per share, that's a sweet half-million dollars. Coincidence? Galloway, by the way, is not in the oil business. "I've never seen a bottle of oil, owned one or bought one," he stated. He didn't mention oil vouchers from Saddam, however.
Patrick Maugein received a hefty 25 million barrels' worth of vouchers. In case you don't know, he's a close friend and personal advisor to French President Jaques Chirac, as well as being one of his chief financial backers. Is it a coincidence that Chirac instructed the French ambassador to the UN to reject any proposal made by the US/UK that would carry a credible threat of force?
Surprisingly, the German and Chinese governments deserve credit for their absence from this list. Though Germany's opposition to the use of force in Iraq was almost as vociferous as France's, it appears -- so far -- to have been somewhat cleaner. China's opposition was much more passive. Many German and Chinese oil, electronics and weapons firms had large development contracts with Saddam's government, but the governments of those nations have not yet been tied to Saddam.
Russia, however, received in excess of 1.3 BILLION barrels' worth of oil contracts. From the Liberal Democratic Party (79.8 million barrels) to the various companies of the Communist Party (137 million), to the Russian Orthodox Church (5 million), Saddam's oil money -- and influence -- flowed throughout the country. Though President Vladimir Putin himself was not named, his party -- the Peace and Unity Party -- received 34 million barrels.
Most damning, for those who refuse to believe that Saddam had financial ties to terrorism, the PLO received 4 million barrels.
How can we go on pretending that the so-called anti-war movement was, at its heart, controlled by anything more than those whose souls were bought and paid for with Saddam's stolen oil? Just before the war in Iraq began, John Kerry, Massachusetts Senator and democratic Presidential hopeful, derided the Coaliton that liberated Iraq as a "trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted". Perhaps he should have been looking at the "anti-war" movement instead.
