'Gaping holes' in oil-for-food: Former monitor says U.N. fired him for reporting corruption

CNN.com ^ | March 17, 2005 | Phil Hirschkorn

[billorites]

A former United Nations monitor of the organization's oil-for-food program in Iraq told a congressional committee Thursday that the program had "gaping holes" and that large amounts of aid never reached the Iraqi people.

Rehan Mullick testified that by his estimate more than 20 percent of the shipments to Iraq, worth $1 billion a year, were not distributed properly, with many goods pilfered by the Iraqi military.

"A fourth or fifth of the supplies were not distributed," he said.

Mullick, 39, an American sociologist of Pakistani origin, appeared before the House International Relations Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations.

The subcommittee is one of a half-dozen congressional panels probing the program, which ran from 1996 to 2003, until the U.S.-backed invasion deposed the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Mullick worked for two years in Iraq as a data analyst for the program designed to permit Iraq, while under international economic sanctions stemming from its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, to export a limited amount of its crude oil reserves and import food, medicine and supplies screened by the United Nations.

"Soon after I started my job, it became amply evident that there were gaping holes in U.N.'s efforts to meet objectives," Mullick told the committee in his written statement, though he read aloud only parts of it.

Mullick said in his statement that a database to track the humanitarian shipments was "muddled beyond repair," that survey techniques "were at best amateurish," and that statistics quoted by the United Nations were "misleading."

Over seven years in the program, Iraq sold 3.4 billion barrels of oil for $64.2 billion, which was deposited by buyers in a U.N.-controlled bank account.

More than two-thirds of the money was earmarked to buy goods, while the balance paid for program costs, weapons inspectors and reparations to Kuwait.

[pissant]

CNN has finally deciphered the writing on the wall. Now they are going to pretend they've been all over this story instead of covering up.

[coconutt2000]

Or... CNN is going to find some way to use this story to give Hillary some good press.

[Esteemed Scholar Jack Bauer]

bank accounts- CNN?

[happyathome]

And yet Wart Churchill would have you believe the US was to blame for the lack of food and medicine in Iraq from 1991-2003.

[yoe]

Mullick, 39, an American sociologist of Pakistani origin, appeared before the House International Relations Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations.

Is this group about like the 9/11 Commission or the Warren Commission, or the United Nations Humanitarian Commissions? Or will they actually do the right thing?

[Blogatron]

 

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