MaximsNews

To Today's News from the U.N. and the World, visit: MaximsNews.com Established 1999.

MaximsNews.com, News Network Reaching Over 10,000 in the International Community, now in association with MediaChannel.org and Globalvision News Network, global news and media information services with more than 300 news affiliates in 135 countries.

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com [See his Bio. See his columns listed below. Ian Williams' email: uswarreport@igc.org ]

UNITED NATIONS -- 13 July 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / In one of his most perceptive essays, on politics and language George Orwell wrote about a certain style of polemical literary language, that it had “a curious mouthing sort of quality, as of someone who is choking with rage & and can never quite hit on the words he wanted.”

William Safire in his language maven mode must have read this essay and taken the description as a prescription for his work as a political columnist – especially when he is writing about the United Nations – and Kofi Annan.

Safire’s latest content-light attack on the U.N. in this morning's New York Times Syndicated Service, proves that the facts will never interfere with his prejudice when the U.N. is at stake.

Why does The New York Times allow valuable column space to someone whose idea of fact checking is to rave into an echo chamber and take the return message as confirmation?

He claims in this morning’s column – a worthy successor to the collected works of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller -- that he is examining a “a political corruption story beginning to gain traction that will reach warp speed in hearings and headlines next spring.”

In other words, he has no tangible evidence to offer on this obsession, but as always, has great expectations that something will come up to match his phobias.

His method is the Jackson Pollack School of investigation. Throw accusations and innuendoes at the page and hope that others see a pattern in there.

Of course, he refers once again to what he previously, and erroneously called the “the largest financial ripoff in history: Preliminary estimates from the GAO point to $10 billion skimmed or kicked back or otherwise stolen in the United Nations' dealings with Saddam Hussein.”

In fact, his ravings are most modest. I was on Scarborough Country on Friday night, and Joe Scarborough had the bill up to $100 billion –more than the entire Iraqi oil sales for the whole period of sanctions!

Item: the GAO report he refers to was honest enough to point out that $5.7 billion of that alleged sum was oil smuggled to American allies that the U.N. had no control over – and that the U.S. made no attempt to stop.

Safire refers to the “skimmed billions, much of it owed to those Kurdish Iraqis shortchanged by U.N. dispensers of largesse?”

They got a fixed percentage of the oil revenue: while collecting a large percentage on that $5.7 billion of smuggled oil, much of which went by truck through Kurdistan to Turkey , watched by U.S. officers, photographed by the Western media.

Item: the other $4.1 was in kickbacks and bribes negotiated directly between the Iraq and supplier countries, as mandated by a U.S. sponsored resolution, and which the U.N.’s Oil For Food Program repeatedly brought to the attention of the sanctions committee.

There are unproven allegations that one U.N. official may have benefited from this.

Item: the biggest scandal in history was certainly the Savings and Loan debacle, a Reagan era scam caused by deregulation for which our children will be paying.

Among others may be Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Halliburton’s uncontested contracts for the Iraq War.

Item: at the end of all this alleged looting, the Oil For Food Program handed over $7.6 billion to Paul Bremer’s Iraqi Development Fund.

The international auditors are trying to find out why most of that money went to American companies like Halliburton, on uncontested contracts.

Item: Without the Oil For Food Program there would have been mass starvation in Iraq , or a complete breakdown of international observance of sanctions.

In response to the hysteria of Safire and his chums at The Wall Street Journal, and their confirmed kook allies in Congress, Kofi Annan appointed Paul Volcker to head an investigation, Safire now deems this to be “seeking to manage the news of the scandal.”

This is intended to thwart “truly independent inquiries” that in Safire’s perfervid imagination are going to back him up.

Perhaps he means that conducted by the House committee chaired by Congressman Henry Hyde, who is on record as saying that the U.S. should leave the U.N. – and that is one of his more lucid moments.

At times, Safire does sound like the fly in the LaRochefauld fable, who thinks that because he buzzes around the cart-horse’s muzzle he is making the cart move.

Indeed, Safire’s sources of information are not dissimilar to the fly’s staple diet.

But there is one certainty – he loves name-dropping, perhaps hoping that it will lend verisimilitude to an otherwise florid and unconvincing narrative.

He says, “To overcome criticism like mine of his committee's lack of subpoena power or ability to take testimony under oath, Volcker has hooked up with Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who has been prosecuting two men in an unrelated distressed debt case at BNP Paribas; that's the French bank the United Nations used for its oil-for-food letters of credit.

That grand old prosecutor has a staff skilled at following money and has sitting grand juries available to encourage truth-telling.”

Volcker should have sub-poena powers. Excuse me – a United Nations organ having subpoena powers in the United States and the other 190 members countries?

Why not suggest that this is a suitable subject for the International Criminal Court, make Volcker a special prosecutor and give him and the court powers of subpoena and arrest over all the world’s citizens?

Personally I think the idea is not a bad one, but one suspects that Safire’s comrades in isolationism may differ.

As indeed may he, if he used logic instead of stringing together contingent prejudices.

In any case, Morgenthau can convene as many Grand Juries in Manhattan as he likes, but not one of the 190 member states is any more likely to recognize them than the U.S. is to accept an arrest warrant from the ICC.

He claims that the State Department “has been slow-walking congressional requests for documents that reveal its own poor oversight and that embarrass the United Nations, which it now wants to placate.”

Copies of all the “secret documents” that he and his friends have been baying for the U.N. to reveal to Congress were handed over the U.S. as part of the 661 Committee.

Occam’s razor suggests that State is more worried about its embarrassment, that the documents will show it did nothing to stop the genuine aspects of the scandal when prompted to do so by the U.N. Oil For Food Program.

“Volcker, still in a start-up stage after four months, assures The Wall Street Journal he hired a great senior staff.

But one is Richard Murphy, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a veteran Arab apologist on television.

Will he prevail on Jordan 's king to get the Philadelphia Investment Corp. in Amman to open its files about financing favored ‘beneficiaries?’

Or dare to demand the United Arab Emirates order its Al Wasel and Babel trading company to explain the lucrative electrical projects that had nothing to do with food?”

That Safire has never really had time for Arabs or anyone else who does, and would disagree with almost anything Richard Murphy says about anything.

Of course, one notes that Safire does not ask Murphy to use his influence with Jordan to spill the beans on the outstanding conviction and sentencing of one Ahmed Chalabi for Bank Fraud there – Safire is nothing but selective about the scandals he deems merit investigation.

And it was of course Chalabi who set this particular fly buzzing in an attempt to derail Brahimi and the U.N.’s involvement in Iraq .

But if The New York Times occasionally lent Safire a fact checker they would explain that while it was called the Oil For Food Program, it was indeed allowed, by a U.S. supported Security Council resolution, to finance the imports of industrial equipment such as electrical power supply and oil industry equipment.

And all those contracts went past the American representatives on the Sanctions Committee of the U.N.

He says magisterially, of Mark Pieth of the University of Basel, “of high repute in countering money laundering,” that his “work will be judged on whether he can crack Swiss government secrecy to reveal the goings-on at Cotecna,” for which he says yet again, “Annan's son was its consultant just before the fat contract was issued.”

By which Safire means, of course that he will not accept any verdict other than guilty without shouting “cover-up,” even if he is no belatedly admitting that Annan’s son was not there when the contract was signed.

Finally, he says vacuously but portentously “Bankers, traders and honest U.N. underlings are eager to whistle-blow; shoe-leather reporting is required to hot-foot the watchmen now that they are finally awake.”

It is a rallying call to every other crackpot to jump on the Safire bandwagon when it is clear as we used to say in Britain , "the old guy is not quite the full shilling."

It is not even a huge scandal by the standards of current American corporate behavior.

It is a manifestation of as Orwell said “someone who is choking with rage.”

Too sophisticated to join the backwoodsmen with their belief that the U.N. is about to take over the U.S.A ., the mention of the organization reduces him to apoplectic logorrhea, a form of literary primal scream therapy.

But are the op-ed pages of The New York Times the appropriate forum for such forms of care in the community?

William Safire – Warped, on Speed, or Just Running Mad Again? 13 July 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546 16 June 2004