Free Republic

For the first time since he began his investigation, the man charged with getting to the bottom of the oil-for-food scandal says he has uncovered "serious problems" with the program. In an interview with FOX News on Wednesday former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker (search) said that he will be publishing an initial report in about two months, and it will likely be damaging for U.N. officials and many others involved in the oil-for-food program.

<p>May 13, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - U.N. investigators have arrived in Baghdad to look at "smoking gun" files that purportedly document wholesale bribery of U.N. officials and international political figures by Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned. Sources close to the probe said staffers of the U.N. commission, headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, were in Iraq to open a critical phase of the investigation into the oil-for-food program scandal.</p>

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has begun a high-level investigation into allegations of kickbacks and bribes in the U.N.-run oil-for-food programme for Iraq. Volcker assumed his post as head of a three-man team after he was assured that all 15 members of the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution to back the investigation, which will include a probe of contracts with Iraq around the world. "We will be following the money as well as we can," Volcker Volcker told a news conference. "I wanted a resolution to make sure that member...

WASHINGTON — How fares the multination cover-up of the richest rip-off in world history? Obstruction of justice has never had it so good. Last month, after some badgering in this space and elsewhere, the House International Relations Committee announced it would look into the $5 billion kickback scandal in the United Nations' six-year Iraqi oil-for-food program, the largest humanitarian aid effort ever undertaken. Our State Department, eager for U.N. help in Iraq, wants no revelations of U.N. ineptitude and corruption. It waltzed the committee staff around. Senate Foreign Relations, however, not wanting to be upstaged by its House counterpart, called...

<p>When Edith Bartley called the Journal last Wednesday morning to say that her husband had finally lost his long and courageous battle against cancer, my thoughts went back to my first meeting with Robert L. Bartley. That was a long time ago. In the late 1960s, Bob had dropped into the Journal's London bureau, where I was based. He was then an editorial writer in New York, barely 30 years old, but didn't seem especially thrilled in the presence of glamorous foreign correspondents.</p>