22 September 2004 Blog Home : September 2004 : Permalink
If (to pick a name totally not at random) Halliburton had committed such a flagrant set of scams we'd have almost every newspaper and journalist on the planet digging for more. But when its Saddam Hussein scamming via the sainted UN Secretariat we hear practically nothing
A few posts ago I called media people hypocrites and I in the immediately previous post I fisked some idiot about his VRWC theory on Rathergate. This would be another excellent example of media bias. It's about a scam that potentially dwarfs ENRON and includes politicians and sleazy businessmen, as well as possible terrorists, has copious real documentation not hacked up on a word processor and run through a photocopier three times and there seems to be just one journalist investigating.
Roger L Simon compares it to the Rather stonewalling, but I think that's only half the story.
As Claudia Rossett's latest update in the WSJ concludes
But what we know already is that Mr. Annan, whose Secretariat turned a blind eye to Saddam's food pricing scams, has never apologized for presiding over the biggest fraud in the history of relief. He has not used the word "illegal." The closest he's come has been to admit this past March, after much stonewalling, that there may have been quite a lot of "wrong-doing"--before turning over the whole mess over to a U.N. investigation that has since smothered all details with its own blanket of secrecy.
Mr. Annan is due to step down next year. If he wants to leave a legacy more auspicious than having presided over Oil-for-Fraud, he might want to devote his twilight time at the U.N. to mending a system in which a U.N. Secretary-General feels free to describe the overthrow of a murderous tyrant as "illegal," but no one at the top seems particularly bothered to have presided over that tyrant's theft of food from hungry children.
Maybe CBS and 60 minutes could redeem themselves by doing an investigation of the UN Oil for Food program? I can almost certainly guarrantee they would get enormous ratings and Ms Rosett has lots of the information already. Surely for a suitable fee she would be willing to help CBS get a story with compelling visuals that would be a ratings monster.