MaximsNews.com Columnist 

William Safire and Kofi Annan

by Ian Williams 

On target! Williams in shooting competition with a governor in Yemen.

 Ian also appears on Good Morning America, the O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Wolf Blitzer, ABC, CBC, CNN, BBC, ITN, and CNBC.    

          UNITED NATIONS -- 1 December 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com /   The Ancient Mariner is at it again. The first hint of a  full moon and there is William Safire with his glittering eye and skinny hand tapping out his New York Times column, obsessing about Kofi Annan, who he depicts as a diabolical synthesis of Darth Vader and Al Capone. 

“There are still officials of the oil-stained U.N. Secretariat who profess to believe the repeated denials of Benon Sevan, the longtime right-hand man of Kofi Annan put in charge of what became history's largest swindle” he foamed at his key board. 

Sadly, instead of  following Coleridge’s script, “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon !” the New York Times validates his droolings by carrying it. I am not a fan of British libel laws, but they do teach our profession some residual respect for fact-checking.

I rather suspect that if Benon Sevan, the former head of the Oil For Food program lived in London , and William Safire’s column appeared in the International Herald Tribune, that Sevan could make much more money from a libel case than he is alleged to have made in one scrap of hitherto unexamined paper from dubious sources from Iraq .

Indeed, if we look at the fate of Dan Rather, burnt at the stake for not establishing the full provenance of a scrap of paper about Bush’s national guard career, even though he validated its actual contents with a human source, one has to wonder at the double standards.

Safire ends his column, “This marks the end of the beginning of the scandal. Its end will not begin until Kofi Annan, even if personally innocent, resigns - having, through initial ineptitude and final obstructionism, brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations.”

In fact, I think we should have a poll. Should the New York Times fire William Safire sooner than his announced departure date? Or should they just set the fact checkers on him and hope that that will frighten him off?

“History’s biggest swindle,” he alleges. Bigger than Enron? Bigger than Halliburton? Bigger than the Savings and Loan Scandal?  

Apparently, an adult son not telling you all his business details makes you unfit to hold high office.

Yeah, just like Safire called for Bush senior’s resignation when his offspring was neck-deep in the Savings and Loans affair.

Or for the resignation of Cheney, the  former CEO of Halliburton, because of the real scandals surrounding it. But then all of these real, and really big rip-offs were conducted by chums of the grey-bearded loon!

So is there an Oil For Food “Scandal?”

Yes, indeed, there are. Let us begin with the nine billion dollars from the Oil For Food program that were handed over to Bremer and were promptly passed on to Halliburton in bid-free contracts as far as we can tell, since no one is cooperating with the audit.

It is a scandal that none of these editorialists has called for an inquiry into those real missing billions.

It is a scandal that Kofi Annan has been harried into running an expensive thirty million dollar two year long inquiry into how stormy it can get in a tea cup.

It is a scandal that when Annan picks a respected, indeed revered, figure in the financial world, Paul Volcker, to conduct the inquiry they had demanded, the rabid Neo Con hordes then start maligning his integrity too – while attacking Annan for setting up the inquiry.

It is a scandal that the likes of Safire now shed crocodile tears about entirely hypothetical lives lost in Iraq because of diverted money while they snap their fanged  jaws in delight at untold thousands of Iraqi civilians they have killed with their war – not to mention the thousand plus Americans whose blood should be on their hands as well.

It is a scandal that they all supported sanctions when they were directly responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, remember Madeleine Albright –“a price worth paying.”

It is a scandal that Safire and Co. supported the first Bush administration when it gave moral support, material aid and diplomatic cover to Saddam Hussein, as he used poison gas on the Kurds and waged a war of aggression on Iran .

It is a scandal that we do not hear that Halliburton subsidiaries, when Cheney was running the company, were bidding successfully for Oil For Food Contracts.

It is a scandal that so-called journalists happily elide the money that Saddam got from selling oil to Turkey and Jordan – with Washington ’s blessing, and lay it at the door of the UN.

It is a scandal that the Security Council Sanctions Committee, did not take action on information about the percentages that Iraq was charging – when the  Oil For Food officials informed them about it.

What Safire and his pals have done, relatively unchallenged even by the saner media,  is to lay every dime and dinar that Saddam made from the first to the Second Gulf Wars at the door of the United Nations.

The sums allegedly involved keep ballooning like the Federal Deficit. The GAO said ten billions, but admitted that half of that had nothing to do with the UN at all, no matter how tenuously. Fox yelped about the ten billion and overlooked the GAO’s fine print.

Safire says twenty billion. Joe Scarborough on MSNBC says a hundred billion – which is more than the entire value of the oil piped out under the program!

And here we come to the nub of the “scandal.” It was begun by deranged and disgruntled NeoCons who could not accept that the UN, far from being dead, was where the White House wanted to pass the buck for the Iraqi fiasco.

They began the campaign to undermine Lakhdar Brahimi’s efforts to end the occupation, and then it got legs of its own. Henry Hyde, someone on the record as wanting the US to leave the UN, suddenly discovered a concern for its reputation.

All the Neanderthalers who had been at a loss since Jesse Helms took his own Klannish form of isolationism out of the Senate have rallied to the banner. And now they will not forgive Kofi Annan for telling, no matter how politely, the honest truth. The invasion of Iraq was against the UN Charter.

If you look, the White House has been silent on this. In fact, I was on a Fox TV show with White House spokesman Dan Bartlett just before the election where he was actually trying to pour oil on the disturbed waters.

The bad news is that the dark forces who initiated this campaign look like they will be in the ascendancy in the new Bush White House.

In fact, you only have to contrast the NeoCon bayings on Cable TV and in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal with the serious, sourced investigations in the news pages of the Journal, and other newspapers that still have fact checkers.

But their silence is letting the mud stick. Of course lots of people want Annan to resign. He is African and uppity. He does not do what he is told. He thinks that the other 190 members of the UN and their governments should have some say in the organization.

So, let’s get some parity here. Why should we only call on the New York Times to fire Safire? Let’s get the real albatross off the world’s collective neck.

Where are the editorials calling for the resignation of Bush and all his cabinet for lying us into a 200 billion dollars, one hundred thousand dead war?                                                           

                Email Ian Williams:  IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

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