29 September 2008 @ 9:02AM >> If you happen to be in Washington, D.C. this week, there are a few films you should take time out to see.

Do As I Say exposes the hypocrisy of the political and media elite, who preach one thing to the masses while practicing another.

U.N. Me is a searing indictment of the United Nations and how its institutional fecklessness has cost countless lives and wasted billions of dollars.

I’ve seen early edits of both of these films. You will be stunned.

One film I can’t wait to see is An American Carol, David Zucker’s hilarious-looking sendup of Michael Moore and the politics of Hollywood.

All of these films will be shown at the American Film Renaissance festival, from October 1st through the 4th. Scheduling information and tickets are available online.

25 January 2008 >> According to an upcoming 60 Minutes report, Saddam Hussein lied about weapons of mass destruction:

Saddam Hussein initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen. The Iraqi dictator revealed this thinking to George Piro, the FBI agent assigned to interrogate him after his capture.

[...]

“He told me he initially miscalculated... President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998...a four-day aerial attack,” says Piro. “He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.” “He didn’t believe the U.S. would invade?” asks Pelley, “No, not initially,” answers Piro.

[...]

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD...to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

By the time the war began, Saddam Hussein had already been subverting the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program for years. U.N. bureaucrats and foreign officials around the globe were being paid by Saddam to look the other way as he used the Oil-for-Food program as his own personal slush fund in one of the biggest financial scams in human history.

In other words, the U.N.’s sanctions against Saddam were far worse than completely ineffective; they were helping Saddam’s regime.

Without war, sanctions would have eventually gone away, and the rest of the world would have been in the position of hoping that the Saddam Hussein was completely reformed and that his talk never turned into action.

Given Saddam’s history of filling mass graves, only a fool would stake their safety on that wishful thinking.

2 April 2007 @ 9:19AM >> Germany’s Der Spiegel asks “Does Germany already Have Sharia Law?“

And in another piece, the widely-read pan-European magazine looks at anti-Americanism in German society, noting that Germans now “believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran.” Perhaps part of the reason Germans don’t perceive Iran as a threat is that the country, like the rest of Europe, has carefully avoided inflaming Iran for decades:

The German political establishment, which will no doubt loudly lament the result of the poll, is largely responsible for this wave of anti-Americanism. For years the country’s foreign ministers fed the Germans the fairy tale of what they called a “critical dialogue” between Europe and Iran. It went something like this: If we are nice to the ayatollahs, cuddle up to them a bit and occasionally wag our fingers at them when they’ve been naughty, they’ll stop condemning their women to death for “unchaste behavior” and they’ll stop building the atom bomb.

That plan failed at some point — an outcome, incidentally, that Washington had long anticipated. Iran continues to work away unhindered on its nuclear program, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacts to UN demands with an ostentatious show of ignorance. The UN gets upset and drafts a resolution.

[...]

For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.

[...]

Iran is a different story. The last time someone made a joke on German TV about an Iranian leader, the outcome was not pleasant. Exactly 20 years ago, Dutch entertainer Rudi Carell produced a short TV sketch portraying Ayatollah Khomeini dressed in women’s underwear. Carell received death threats. The piece, which lasted all of a few seconds, led to flights being cancelled and German diplomats being expelled from Tehran. Carell apologized. Jokes about fat Americans are just safer.

Fast forward to the Cartoon Intifada, the rioting, the burning embassies, and the death toll that arose out of cartoons in a newspaper, and you can see why the trembling Europeans are reluctant to say anything critical about Iran or radical Islam. But they might not see Iran as a threat, much in the same way that a compliant gradeschooler doesn’t see the local bully as a threat as long as he hands over his lunch money whenever he’s asked.

Say what you want about the Americans, though, because your head won’t get chopped off as a result. So it’s easy, although shortsighted, for you Europeans to direct your anger at the United States. There are no consequences for it. We’ll still come to your defense when your cities start falling to your own home-grown Jihadists in a generation or two, just as we provided for the common defense of Europe for the half-century bounded by World War II and the fall of the Soviet Empire, allowing you to spend next to nothing on your own defense and build up your lavishly unproductive welfare states.

But by engaging in this ostrich act whenever confronted with reality, Europe is not only postponing the inevitable, but making it inevitably worse. Because today’s schoolyard bully doesn’t have a nuclear weapon...yet. But it may soon, no matter how many worthless pieces of paper the U.N. issues. So when the bully graduates to mass murder of unspeakable proportions, there will be those of us who said we told you so. And we’ll remember all those nasty words you said about us. And then we’ll help, because this is our fight too.

We just wish you’d wake up and see it for yourselves.

20 January 2007 >> From the Wall Street Journal:

Saddam Hussein managed to pull off the $100 billion Oil for Food scam right under the noses of the United Nations officials charged with administering it. Now another dictator with nuclear ambitions has succeeded in a similar trick, this time manipulating the United Nations Development Program in North Korea.

The United Nations long ago devolved into a speaking society whose prime purpose seems to be providing a forum for petty tyrants to denounce the United States. More recently, the U.N. has become one giant slush fund for some of the worst dictators in the world.

All the while, American taxpayers foot the bill for 22% of the U.N.’s budget, despite the fact that the U.S. is only one of 192 members of the U.N.

It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to wonder why we allow this abomination to occupy some of the most valuable real estate in the world...

4 January 2007 @ 9:01AM >> London’s Daily Telegraph is reporting yet another case of sexual abuse—with victims as young as 12—at the hands of United Nations personnel:

The abuse allegedly began two years ago when the UN mission in southern Sudan (UNMIS) moved in to help rebuild the region after a 23-year civil war. The UN has up to 10,000 military personnel in the region, of all nationalities and the allegations involve peacekeepers, military police and civilian staff.

The first indications of possible sexual exploitation emerged within months of the UN force’s arrival and The Daily Telegraph has seen a draft of an internal report compiled by the UN children’s agency Unicef in July 2005 referring to the problem.

This paper has learnt of more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

“I was sitting by the river the first time it happened,” said Jonas, 14, one of more than 20 children who claimed they had been abused this way.

“A man in a white car drove past and asked me if I wanted to get into the car with him. I saw that the car was a UN car because it was white with the black letters on it. The man had a badge on his clothes. When he stopped the car, we got out, he put a blindfold on me and started to abuse me. It was painful and went on for a long time. When it was over we went back to the place we had been, and he pushed me out of the car and left.”

[...]

Many of the children who claim to have had sex with UN personnel in Juba belong to southern Sudan’s “lost generation”, separated from their families by the recent civil war, who now sleep rough on the streets of Juba, the regional capital.

This paper has gathered more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex.

It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

Hundreds of children reportedly suffer abuse at the hands of U.N. staffers, but I guarantee this story will be short blip on the media’s radar. Meanwhile, when terrorists are allegedly treated badly by U.S. forces, the story becomes front page news for months.

Responding to the abuse allegations, one U.N. official adopts the grand tradition of sexual predators blaming their victims. James Ellery is a regional coordinator for the U.N. in Sudan:

“I will refute all claims made on this issue,” he said in an interview last May. “We investigated all allegations made and no evidence was forthcoming. None of these claims can be substantiated. This is the most backward country in Africa and there are lots of misunderstandings as to the UN’s role. Over 90 per cent of people here are illiterate and rumours therefore spread very quickly.”

What a class act this guy is. The victims are illiterate, they live in a “backward” African country, and they don’t understand the U.N.’s role. Therefore, it couldn’t have happened.

12 September 2006 >> Not only did Saddam Hussein have CNN’s chief news executive covering for him, it now appears that Saddam had a spy inside the Associated Press who was supplying the Iraqi dictator with information on U.N. weapons inspection plans.

AP bills itself as “the backbone of the world’s information system serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers” and “is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, serving as a source of news, photos, graphics, audio and video for more than one billion people a day.”

An organization that large is vulnerable to infiltration, and a lone Iraqi spy inside AP is not necessarily a sign of a systemic problem. Still, it makes you wonder who else has infiltrated the world’s big media outlets, and whether they’re having any effect on coverage. (In the case of AP rival Reuters, we already know the answer.)

28 August 2006 @ 2:02PM >> Item 1: Despite the fact that a previous U.N. resolution ordered the disarmament of all non-governmental militias in Lebanon, Secretary General Kofi Annan says that the U.N. will not disarm Hizbollah. “Troops are not going in there to disarm — let’s be clear,” the U.N. leader said. Lebanon’s army is expected to disarm Hizbollah, the U.N. says, even though Lebanon’s own president says that his government will do no such thing. So, in other words, Israel settled for a cease-fire in which the U.N. gives Hizbollah more leeway than it had before the war. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Item 2: A United Nations group called UNIFIL, the same group whose positions were used by Hizbollah to launch rockets into Israel, broadcast real-time Israeli troop and armaments movements during the recent war. Oddly, the U.N. group offered no such level of detail about Hizbollah’s operations, even though Hizbollah has a history of operating within several yards of UNIFIL. Anyone with an Internet connection could find this treasure-trove of military intelligence, but the information was really only valuable to people interested in fighting the Israeli army. Who wants to bet that UNIFIL is in Hizbollah’s bookmarks folder?

Long ago, the United Nations passed the point of being a joke. Now it’s a tragedy.

28 July 2006 @ 8:54AM >> Earlier this week, four U.N. officials were killed in Lebanon by an apparent Israeli airstrike. Within hours of the event, U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan announced his belief that Israel had deliberately targeted the U.N. personnel. Annan demanded that “any further attack on U.N. positions and personnel must stop.”

Yesterday, strong evidence came to light suggesting that Hizbollah was effectively using the U.N. position as a shield, conducting attacks against Israel, knowing that any Israeli response was likely to hit the U.N. post. The New York Sun reports that one of the U.N. officials killed in the attack had earlier sent e-mails saying that Hizbollah was “all over” his position. The recipient of those e-mails, a former major-general in the Canadian military named Lewis MacKenzie, described their contents:

“What he was telling us was Hezbollah fighters were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them, and that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the U.N. They use the U.N. as shields knowing that they cannot be punished for it.”

To Hizbollah, civilians and U.N. positions are strategic assets. The terrorist group routinely launches attacks from residential areas and near U.N. posts. Hizbollah knows that this puts Israel in a bind: if Israel decides to respond, that response will provide a tear-jerking scene for the evening news where the headline will be “Israeli Bomb Kills Civilians,” or “U.N. Officials Killed in Israeli Airstrike.” But if Israel backs down out of a fear of how the media will report the story, then Hizbollah gets a safe haven where they can launch attacks with impunity. Hizbollah wins either way, with a propaganda victory or a military one.

Of course, to any fair-minded person, it is obvious that Hizbollah bears the responsibility for the deaths of those U.N. officials. It’s too bad the U.N. doesn’t have a leader who understands that.

22 July 2006 @ 4:21PM >> Sheesh. I can’t even take a week off without war breaking out.

Of course, to those who’ve been paying attention, this is not a new war. Israel has been under siege since the founding of the modern state in 1948. The war has never been about the plight of Palestinians. If the Palestinians wanted to live side-by-side with Israel in peace, then the Oslo peace accords would have worked. When Oslo didn’t stick, and Israel offered virtually everything Yassir Arafat demanded, the Palestinian leader instead rejected peace and launched an intifada. If Israel’s neighbors truly wanted peace, then why didn’t Israel’s retreat from Palestinian territory secure it? Why is every Israeli compromise and concession followed by more war?

Because Israel’s enemies will not be satisfied with anything less than the country’s complete destruction. They believe Israel is an illegitimate state and that no infidel has a valid claim to what they believe should be Muslim land. But to any fair-minded person, a cursory look at history settles that debate quite easily, as Judith Weiss points out:

Half of Israel’s Jewish population is Arab Jews, not European Jews. How come there are Arab Jews? Because they were in Israel/Judea before Arabs became Muslim. In fact, they were the Jews before various historical events scattered and exiled some of them, one destination being Europe. [...]

The earliest verifiably Jewish artifacts in Israel date to 1500 years before it was conquered by Islam. Contemporary documents and archeological finds verify some Biblical history, and show evidence of Jews in Persia 1000 years before it was conquered by Islam, in Babylonia (later Iraq) 1000 years before it was conquered by Islam, and in Egypt (especially Alexandria) during the Roman Empire, before Egypt was conquered by Islam. Even the Koran acknowledges that Jews were living in Arabia before Mohammed decided to create a new religion, and there is evidence for Jewish residence in what are now Arab countries dating back to Solomonic times.

Don’t expect any of this to satisfy the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These facts won’t sway Hamas, the terrorist organization that the Palestinians recently elected to govern them. Nor will these facts stem the never-ending volley of rockets that have been raining down on Israel from Hizbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon.

Yes, in the two years since the U.N. flaccidly ordered militias like Hizbollah to disarm, the group has inexplicably failed to do so. It’s almost as if terrorists have no respect for the authority of the United Nations! Shocking, I know; I assumed the threat of more speechifying from Secretary General Kofi Annan would be enough to cause even the most militant fanatic to lay down his arms. But I guess the U.N. isn’t as potent as I thought.

Which leads to the current problem. After Syria—Hizbollah’s terror co-sponsor with Iran—withdrew its occupation forces from Lebanon last year, optimism abounded in that newly-independent state, but the state proved too weak to secure its own southern territory. So Lebanon became a broken nation. And, just as the failed state of Afghanistan made it succumb to the Taliban and al Qaeda, Hizbollah succeeded in turning southern Lebanon into its terror playground.

With the backing of Syria and Iran, the playground bully has become quite strong. Hizbollah has already fired thousands of missiles into Israel, and thanks to weapons from Iran, the group now appears capable of hitting every major Israeli population center. And now that Iran looks to be on a fast track to becoming a nuclear power, within the next five or ten years, Hizbollah—if it still exists—could be dropping Iranian nukes on Israel.

When Hizbhollah operatives recently ventured into Israeli territory to kidnap two soldiers, they weren’t just violating the borders of a sovereign nation, they were trying to show the Israeli people that not only was their military incapable of protecting civilians, they weren’t even capable of protecting themselves. Against the backdrop of the missile attacks, Israel interpreted this as what it was: yet another act of war. And this time, Israel responded with a forceful attack on Hizbollah positions inside Lebanon.

But many are now criticizing Israel, saying that the country’s response is not proportional to the provocation, as if the provocation hasn’t been ongoing for years. Pretending that Hizbollah’s only crime is capturing two Israeli soldiers requires quite a bit of historical amnesia. But to the wishy-washy handwringers at the U.N., that amnesia is required; without it, they might actually be forced to take a stand. They might actually have to do something besides laundering money for Saddam Hussein and selling 12-year-old girls into sexual slavery. But, of course, the U.N. will do nothing useful; what do you expect from a world body where terror regimes like Iran and Syria get the same vote as Canada and Finland?

Cease-fires and negotiated peaces have been tried. Throughout history, world opinion repeatedly forces Israel into bargains with adversaries who use “peacetime” to build strength. No matter how many handshakes, strained smiles and photo ops each new peace deal yields, Israel’s enemies invariably come back and attack later. And no matter how much land Israel gives up—and they’ve given up quite a bit of strategically-important land in their many futile attempts to buy peace—groups like Hizbollah will not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of the Israeli nation.

That’s why a cease-fire, the proposed solution of people who see no moral distinction between the actions of Hizbollah and Israel, has the effect of undermining Israel’s security. Hizbollah won’t perceive a cease-fire as a cooling-off period before joining Israel on a road towards peace, they’ll just see it as a brief pause in a continuing war, a time-out they can use to start rolling more Iranian rockets towards the Israeli border. And if Hizbollah manages to hold on to southern Lebanon until Iran can produce a nuclear weapon, is there any doubt that they’ll use it? Terrorists aren’t usually known for their restraint. And yet the world is demanding restraint from Israel, which is merely trying to prevent that day from coming.

You can’t negotiate peace with an enemy whose only goal is your destruction. The end result of a cease-fire will not be peace. A cease-fire merely puts off the inevitable for a future day when the stakes are higher. If Hizbollah is not destroyed, and if the current regimes in Iran and Syria maintain power long enough to produce a nuclear weapon and a way to deliver it to Israel, you can be damn sure that weapon will be used. Iran’s president has virtually guaranteed it.

So when the rest of the world demands restraint from Israel, it makes me wonder: would any other country put up with living like the Israelis have for decades? If suicide bombs and lobbed rockets were exploding all over France with such regularity, would we expect the French to sit by and do nothing? Okay, bad example. But you get my point.

As long as the mullahs control Iran and the Baathists control Syria, they will use proxies like Hizbollah to wage war on Israel. Unfortunately, the reality is, this war is inevitable. And it goes beyond Hizbollah. Ultimately, Syria and Iran must be confronted. It can happen today, next year, or sometime after Iran has acquired nukes. As far as the fate of Israel is concerned, this war better play out before the mullahs get the bomb. After that, it’ll be too late.

When will the world wake up and realize that ignoring the Jihadists does not make them go away? People don’t seem to learn until the bombs start blowing up their own cities. And even then, the lesson is quickly forgotten. But if the last five years has taught the world anything, it’s that the hatred of the Jihadists isn’t limited to Israel. And this bone-deep hatred won’t magically vanish if Israel disappears under a mushroom cloud. No, if you’re an infidel, you’re on the list. The only question is how long it’ll take them to get to you.

15 April 2006 @ 1:52PM >> I don’t know any other way to interpret these statements, other than to say that Iran will attack Israel with nuclear weapons at the earliest possibility (emphasis added):

The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was “heading toward annihilation,” just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

[...]

“Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation,” [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. “The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

[...]

On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium using a battery of 164 centrifuges, a significant step toward the large-scale production of enriched uranium required for either fueling nuclear reactors or making nuclear weapons.

For the last few years, peace-at-all-costs advocates have argued that there is no justification for pre-emptive war. They claim that talk and diplomacy can solve all world crises, and that we should put our trust in the United Nations to do just that.

If ever there were a time for the U.N. worshippers to prove that their cherished institution is of any use at all, this is it. Put up or shut up. Solve this problem. The world needs it.

8 December 2005 @ 9:31AM >> According to this map, on prominent display during the UN’s “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” Israel does not (or is that should not?) exist.

I look forward to seeing what kind of maps the UN will be displaying at the “Day of Solidarity with the Israeli People.” Oh wait, there is no such thing...

5 December 2005 @ 1:03PM >> Mohammed ElBaradai, the chairman of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that Iran may now be several months away from developing a nuclear weapon. As if to underscore that point, Iran is starting the process of building two new nuclear reactors. Although oil-rich Iran maintains that it needs nuclear energy to power the country, the byproduct of the reactors also happens to be useful for constructing nuclear weapons.

A nuclear Iran is rather worrisome considering the recent statements of new Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

“And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”

[T]he “new wave of confrontations generated in Palestine and the growing turmoil in the Islamic world would in no time wipe Israel away.”

“[Any country that] recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”

Since we all know that military action is not justified until a threat becomes full and immediate, I’m looking forward to seeing how the brilliant minds at the UN negotiate their way out of this mess. A chance to say, “See, I told you so!” won’t feel nearly as satisfying if I’m doing it from the inside of a mushroom cloud.

21 November 2005 @ 12:57PM >> Slowly but surely, the corruption of French and U.N. officials is being exposed:

One of France’s most distinguished diplomats has confessed to an investigating judge that he accepted oil allocations from Saddam Hussein [...]

Jean-Bernard Merimee is thought to be the first senior figure to admit his role in the oil-for-food scandal, a United Nations humanitarian aid scheme hijacked by Saddam to buy influence.

The Frenchman, who holds the title “ambassador for life”, told authorities that he regretted taking payments amounting to $156,000 [...]

The money was used to renovate a holiday home he owned in southern Morocco. At the time, Mr Merimee was a special adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general.

[...]

The ambassador said the French authorities had known of his every move. France has been gravely embarrassed by oil-for-food allegations against senior figures, including Charles Pasqua, the former interior minister. He has denied receiving any benefit from the oil allocations issued in his name.

Inquiries have also found that French firms benefited disproportionately from oil-for-food contracts as part of an Iraqi policy to influence French votes on the UN Security Council.

8 November 2005 @ 10:38AM >> Senator Norm Coleman describes the threat:

It sounds like a Tom Clancy plot. An anonymous group of international technocrats holds secretive meetings in Geneva. Their cover story: devising a blueprint to help the developing world more fully participate in the digital revolution. Their real mission: strategizing to take over management of the Internet from the U.S. and enable the United Nations to dominate and politicize the World Wide Web. Does it sound too bizarre to be true? Regrettably, much of what emanates these days from the U.N. does.

The Internet faces a grave threat. We must defend it. We need to preserve this unprecedented communications and informational medium, which fosters freedom and enterprise. We can not allow the U.N. to control the Internet.

Absolutely. Any organization that lets Libya, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia sit on its Commission on Human Rights clearly can’t be trusted to keep the Internet free. Do we really want the likes of Fidel Castro having a say in what is and is not acceptable online discourse?

15 June 2005 >> Poor Kofi Annan just can’t catch a break these days. Shortly after the U.N. Secretary General’s hand-picked investigative team expressed only weak confidence that Annan was not directly involved in the Oil for Food scandal, two of the investigators behind the report resigned, saying that it was too soft of Kofi.

The investigators’ suspicion surrounded Cotecna, the European company contracted by the U.N. to oversee the Oil for Food program. During the time that Cotecna was supposedly keeping watch over oil transactions from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, many tens of billions of dollars were diverted by the Hussein regime in order to pay off allies. Also during that time, Kofi Annan’s son Kojo was being paid exorbitant consulting fees by Cotecna.

So, did Cotecna pay Annan’s son in order to get the U.N. contract? Was Cotecna a willing accomplice in letting Saddam Hussein subvert the Oil for Food program? The U.N. investigation never uncovered a smoking gun, perhaps because of the efforts of Kofi’s Chief of Staff:

The most significant finding in the Volcker Report is undoubtedly the revelation that Kofi Annan’s then-Chief of Staff Iqbal Riza authorized the shredding between April and December 2004 of thousands of UN documents—the entire UN Chef de Cabinet chronological files for the years 1997, 1998 and 1999, many of which related to the oil-for-food program.

That makes it a little hard to conduct a thorough investigation, which may explain why the U.N.’s investigators found “no evidence that the selection of Cotecna in 1998 was subject to any affirmative or improper influence of the Secretary-General in the bidding or selection process.” It isn’t easy finding evidence once it’s been destroyed.

But just as Kofi and Kojo have begun settling into their post-investigative relief, an incriminating document surfaced that threatens their comfort once again:

The United Nations panel investigating the Iraq oil-for-food scandal said yesterday it is “urgently reviewing” a 1998 memo in which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appears to endorse a bid by the Swiss firm Cotecna to monitor the program.

If accurate, the memo would contradict a claim by Mr. Annan that he did not know about the bid by Cotecna at the time — a potential conflict of interest because Cotecna employed Mr. Annan’s son, Kojo Annan.

[...]

According to the memo, first reported in yesterday’s editions of the New York Times, Cotecna officials had “brief discussions with the [Secretary General] and his entourage” and said they were told that “we could count on their support.”

[...]

The Geneva-based company won the nearly $10 million contract in late 1998, and investigators charge that it continued to pay the younger Mr. Annan long after he told his father that he had broken all ties with the company.

With or without Kofi Annan at the helm, the United Nations is a seriously flawed organization. Kofi’s resignation wouldn’t fix the U.N.’s structural problems, but with him out of office, at least the U.N. could start rethinking its future. If Kofi insists on staying, the U.N. will continue to be paralyzed by the perpetual damage-control stance that has marked his tenure. Maybe that isn’t so bad, though. An ineffective U.N. might be better than the alternative.

3 June 2005 @ 9:03AM >> Wait a minute...I thought Iraq had no WMD capabilities:

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said he’s reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said it could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or purchased.

He said the missing material can be used for legitimate purposes. “However, they can also be utilized for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair.”

He said imagery analysts have identified 109 sites that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees, up from 90 reported in March.

The report also provided much more detail about the percentage of items no longer at the places where U.N. inspectors monitored them.

From the imagery analysis, Perricos said analysts at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which he heads have concluded that biological sites were less damaged than chemical and missile sites.

The commission, known as UNMOVIC, previously reported the discovery of some equipment and material from the sites in scrapyards in Jordan and the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

Perricos said analysts found, for example, that 53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. “Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents,” he said.

The existence of this much “dual use” equipment—combined with the cat-and-mouse games played by Saddam Hussein whenever the weapons inspectors were in Iraq—means that we would have had to take Hussein at his word that nothing nefarious was going on. That begs the question: how much trust should we have put in Saddam Hussein?

This story also sets up a new twisted-logic opportunity for the perpetual critics of the United States. On the one hand, the fact that the equipment is dual-use means that they can still claim that Saddam Hussein had no WMD program. At the same time, they can complain the United States failed to secure this dangerous equipment after the invasion. (Of course, this assumes that we didn’t move it ourselves, which the U.N. would have no way of knowing.) By this reasoning, the equipment was completely innocuous until the day the U.S. invaded, at which point it became very dangerous. This allows the Saddam-was-never-a-threat argument to conveniently coexist with the United-States-is-completely-negligent argument. Everybody wins!

14 April 2005 >> Some days, it’s not easy being a terrorist:

The U.N. General Assembly approved a global treaty Wednesday aimed at preventing nuclear terrorism by making it a crime for would-be terrorists to possess or threaten to use nuclear weapons or radioactive material.

Upon hearing the news, Osama bin Laden sounded despondent. “I guess we’ll just have to pack it in,” the al Qaeda leader said. “The last thing we’d want is to be considered criminals, least of all by the U.N. Those powder blue helmets scare the shit out of me. People with such atrocious fashion sense are clearly not pansies.”

Reached for comment somewhere in western Iraq along the Syrian border, Abu Musab al Zarqawi struck a bitter note. “We’ve been busting our asses for years to get our hands on that material. Now they go and make it illegal? And not even the courtesy of a little advance notice! What’s up with that? All those calls to Sudan...you know how big my satellite phone bill is? Verizon’s been breaking my balls on overages.”

Bin Laden, resigned to his new fate, appeared more serene than his Jordanian counterpart. “It isn’t easy switching careers at my age,” the lanky leader said. “But what choice do I have?” Though he’s now applying for a job as a mule groomer in Kandahar, bin Laden remains proud of his past accomplishments. “We had a good run.”

5 April 2005 @ 4:00PM >> I have argued for some time that the United Nations is structurally incapable of fulfilling its own charter, which says the organization exists “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person” and “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

Now it has been revealed that fully one-third of the nations listed by Freedom House as “the world’s most repressive regimes” also happen to hold seats on the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights. (These countries are: China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.)

Perhaps the theory is that the nations least likely to recognize human rights are also the ones that most understand the importance of those rights.

31 March 2005 @ 4:28PM >> Remember the unrelenting coverage of the Enron scandal? Listening for similar media indignation over Oil-for-Food? You’re probably hearing nothing but crickets and faint coughs.

Dollar-wise, Oil-for-Food is a much bigger scandal, and that’s ignoring the fact that the U.N. and some of our supposed allies were essentially being paid by Saddam Hussein to oppose our foreign policy position on Iraq. You’d think something like that would be worth covering extensively, but then again, you’re not the editor of The New York Times.

At his G-Scobe website, Gregory Scoblete takes a look at the Times’s editorial outrage gap between Enron and Oil-for-Food. Illuminating, but not entirely surprising.

27 March 2005 @ 3:32PM >> It seems the esteemed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is a little bummed out these days:

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, is said to be struggling with depression and considering his future. Colleagues have reported concerns about Annan ahead of an official report this week that will examine his son Kojo’s connection to the controversial Iraqi oil for food scheme.

[...]

One close observer at the U.N. said Annan’s moods were like a “sine curve” and that he appeared near the bottom of the trough.

Kofi’s depression comes with good reason, and it isn’t just the Oil for Food scandal. The Washington Post reports:

The United Nations is investigating 150 instances in which 50 peacekeeping troops or civilians in the Congo mission are suspected of having sexually abused or exploited women and girls, some as young as 12.

[...]

Similar charges have been made about U.N. missions in Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as Kosovo and Bosnia in Europe.

The United Nations is also investigating reports of rape or sexual assault in Congo, including one case in which a French logistics employee was found with hundreds of videotapes that showed him torturing and sexually abusing naked girls. Last week, U.N. officials announced they had fired one employee and suspended six others from among 17 civilian staff members being investigated in the Congo abuses.

Will these scandals ever reach the saturation coverage of Abu Ghraib? Probably not. As far as the establishment media is concerned, what matters isn’t the severity of the crime, but who perpetrates it.

24 February 2005 >> After seeing Hotel Rwanda this weekend, it’s quite sad to think that it’s happening all over again in the Sudan:

The photo at the upper left was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I’m not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother.

The photo to the right shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.

At the lower left is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.

Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person’s clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

Some estimates of the dead exceed 220,000, “and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.” For political reasons, the U.N. won’t call this a genocide. But if that’s not what this is, then the word has no meaning.

14 December 2004 @ 7:49PM >> The New York Post is reporting that Marc Rich, the billionaire financier who was awarded a “midnight pardon” in one of President Clinton’s last acts in office, is “a central figure” in the U.N. Oil-for-Food corruption scandal:

Billionaire Marc Rich has emerged as a central figure in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and is under investigation for brokering deals in which scores of international politicians and businessmen cashed in on sweetheart oil deals with Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned.

Rich, the fugitive Swiss-based commodities trader who received a controversial pardon from President Bill Clinton in January 2001, is a primary target of criminal probes under way in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York and by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, sources said.

“We think he was a major player in this — a central figure,” a senior law-enforcement official told The Post.

[...]

Investigators say they have received information that Rich and Ben Pollner, a New York-based oil trader who heads Taurus Oil, set up a series of companies in Liechtenstein and other countries that they used to put together deals between Saddam and his international supporters in the controversial oil-voucher scheme — which the dictator designed to win international support against U.S. sanctions at the United Nations.

Under the scam, hundreds of international political and financial figures from France, Russia and other countries were awarded middleman vouchers allowing them to purchase set quantities of Iraqi oil at discount rates.

[...]

Investigators now believe Rich and Pollner brokered many of the deals by finding buyers for the oil allocated to people who were bribed by Saddam. The discount Iraqi oil would be resold to major oil companies at higher prices and Rich and Pollner would pocket percentages of the profits, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sources said.

[...]

In January 2001, in the final hours his presidency, Clinton bypassed law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to wipe the books clean for Rich after being subjected to intense lobbying from former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Rich’s jet-setting ex-wife, Denise, who donated more than $1 million to Democratic campaigns — including Sen. Hillary Rodham’s first Senate race — along with an additional $450,000 to Clinton’s library fund.

Interesting.

10 December 2004 >> John Danforth, the Bush Administration’s envoy to the U.N., seriously diminished the likelihood that anyone will be held accountable in the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal:

“We are expressing confidence in the secretary-general [Kofi Annan] and his continuing in office,” Danforth said, adding that he was speaking for the White House and State Department.

“No one to my knowledge has cast doubt on the personal integrity of the secretary-general. No one,” he said.

Really? No one? Okay, then allow me to be the first: I hereby cast doubt on the integrity of the secretary-general. Sorry, I would have done it sooner, but I thought the doubt was self-evident.

Backing Kofi means that the stonewalling at the U.N. will continue, because nobody with any leverage is challenging it. If only the caricature of Unilateralist George were a little more true...

8 December 2004 >> Turns out the DLC didn’t have the backbone I thought it did:

CORRECTION: the original sub-headline of this New Dem Daily mistakenly summarized the piece as calling for Kofi Annan’s resignation. Actually, in calling for the secretary general to “step aside,” we simply meant to convey that he should remove himself from any involvement in the oil-for-food investigation, and let Paul Volcker, a man of unquestioned integrity and ability, conduct it independently and publicly release his findings. We deeply regret this error.

Hmmm. Now that Clinton pardon recipient Marc Rich has been implicated in the Oil-for-Food scandal, I wonder who got to the DLC and told them to back off Kofi?

Doesn’t matter. Kofi’s still cooked.

7 December 2004 >> The Democratic Leadership Council, which represents the viable wing of the Democratic party, just turned up the heat on Kofi Annan:

[M]ismanagement, corruption, and manipulation of the [oil-for-food] program by Saddam Hussein allowed his regime to amass at least $21 billion outside of the United Nations’ control, with the great bulk of that sum — $17.3 billion — pilfered between 1997 and 2003 on the secretary general’s watch. In effect, the United Nations colluded in Saddam’s successful evasion of U.N. sanctions. The most damning charge so far — that a former chief of the oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, accepted bribes from Saddam’s regime — was made in October by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer, who led a Senate investigation into the scandal. The program is now the subject of at least four congressional investigations, three U.S. federal investigations and the U.N.-appointed commission of inquiry led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

[...]

The secretary general should place this critical mission ahead of his personal interests, and step aside. Given his own lack of credibility on the oil-for-food program, this step is the price Annan must pay to help restore the U.N.’s credibility, and to salvage his legacy as secretary general.

The DLC issuing this statement is remarkably significant. As the organization whose ideology spawned the only two-term Democratic president since FDR, the DLC represents where the Democratic party should be if it wants to reconnect with the American voter.

When the only remaining viable remnant of the Democratic party turns against the leadership of the U.N., it’s big news. No longer can anyone credibly say that the calls for Kofi Annan’s resignation are the result of some right-wing plot. (Not that such claims would have been credible before!) The drumbeat is now bipartisan and multinational. Time to start the countdown on Kofi.

6 December 2004 @ 2:46PM >> Canada’s National Post has added its voice to the growing chorus of calls for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s resignation. And it isn’t just the Oil-for-Food scandal—the biggest financial scam in the history of mankind—cited as the reason:

Mr. Annan has also watched as the U.N. Human Rights Commission has degenerated into a laughingstock run by some of the worst human-rights abusers in the world. He has refused to stop the U.N. agency responsible for delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees from assisting terrorists. And from Rwanda to Srebrenica, East Timor to Sudan, he has time and again permitted himself to be conned by tyrants and butchers while they have murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Some view these scandals as signs that the U.N. needs to be thoroughly reformed. I think they’re proof that the U.N. is structurally incapable of fulfilling its mission. The U.N. occupies valuable land on the east side of midtown Manhattan. It should be put to good use.

15 June 2004 @ 7:07PM >> Despite the fact that the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal has received relatively little media attention, the story continues to roll on...slowly. This report in The New York Post might explain why we don’t yet know more:

Many U.N. employees fear reprisals from their bosses if they step forward with information on the Iraq oil-for-food scandal or report other allegations of corruption, according to a shocking internal survey released yesterday.

Strange...whenever private-sector scandals hit, they receive a full airing in the media. And when they do, the media’s party line is that businesses need more governmental oversight. Of course, the media itself—for all its distortions, biases, fabrications and outright lies—deserves no such oversight. Nor does the United Nations, an entity that is essentially accountable to nobody.

What can one make of this? Fraud is acceptable as long as it’s committed by the media or any organization favored by the media.

By failing to cover the biggest financial scam in the history of mankind with even one-tenth the vigor that it used to cover Enron, the media tells us volumes about its biases.

9 June 2004 @ 9:56PM >> Now that this has happened, is there any chance that the rhetoric of the Democrats (“We’re going it alone”, “We’re thumbing our noses at the U.N.”, etc.) will be toned down at all?

The U.N. Security Council gave resounding approval Tuesday to a resolution endorsing the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq’s new government by the end of June. President Bush said the measure will set the stage for democracy in Iraq and be a “catalyst for change” in the Middle East.

Somehow, I suspect not.

4 June 2004 >> Michelle Malkin writes that U.N. ambulances are being used by Palestinian terrorists for safe passage:

Last week, an Israeli television station aired footage of armed Arab terrorists in southern Gaza using an ambulance owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Palestinian gunmen used the UNRWA emergency vehicle as getaway transportation after murdering six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City on May 11. The footage shows two ambulances with flashing lights pull onto a street. Shots and shouts ring out during the nighttime raid. A gang of militants piles into one of the supposedly neutral ambulances, clearly marked “U.N.” with the agency’s blue flag flying from the roof, which then speeds away from the scene.

Malkin notes that AccessMiddleEast.org has posted the video [Windows Media file; 2.3MB] shot by a Reuters cameraman, but that “not a single U.S. television news station has expressed interest in showing the footage to American viewers.”

Perhaps the media is silent because the incident points to yet another full-blown U.N. scandal:

The UNRWA has long been suspected of providing aid and comfort to terrorists. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, recently documented how “buildings and warehouses under UNRWA supervision are allegedly being used as storage areas for Palestinian ammunition and counterfeit currency factories.” Cantor’s 2002 report also noted that UNRWA hosts summer camps in martyrdom for young terrorists-in-training. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., has also lobbied for increased scrutiny of UNRWA funding, which has been used to publish anti-Semitic textbooks and posters in schools that “glorify homicide bombers and the slaughter of innocents.”

So, why is the media carrying water for the U.N.? Well, if the U.N. looks like a corrupt organization that sides with Palestinian terrorists, then the argument that the U.N. must pre-approve America’s foreign policy looks a hell of a lot less convincing. But the media has a lot vested in that argument: for over a year, it’s been one of the main weapons used to bash President Bush. And it is now a key plank in John Kerry’s foreign policy platform.

In the calculus of the election, bad for U.N. equals good for Bush. So, the media downplays the U.N.’s various scandals and instead focuses on controversies that will have the political impact that the media desires.

27 May 2004 @ 7:02PM >> The U.N. might be corrupt and a complete failure as a world body, but it sure sounds like they throw one hell of a party. In an article entitled “U.N. missions painted as booze-soaked orgies,” the Washington Times reports:

A book by three current and former U.N. employees about peacekeeping operations portrays wild parties with alcohol and drugs, and convicts and mental-asylum inmates passing as soldiers.

Makes me nostalgic for college.

No word yet on whether the book (Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Matters) contains a precise recipe for this concoction:

A favorite drink among the U.N. personnel at the parties was the “Space Shuttle.” It was made “by distilling a pound of marijuana over a six-week period with increasingly good quality spirits. It is a work of love, and the final product is an amber-colored liquid that tastes like cognac. We drink it with rounds of Coke.”

One contingent of U.N. “peacekeepers” in Phnom Penh were described as follows:

They’re drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency.

Perhaps the broadcast media can squeeze in a word or two about this between updates on Abu Ghraib prison.