Sunday, August 07, 2005
The Kofi coverass scandal continues
The hour is a non-business one. The New York Times and Tweedles CNN and BBC still have time to catch up on the story being splashed now on Fox News:
(UN Oil-for-food head honcho) Benon Sevan ... resigned from the United Nations Sunday — just hours before the results of a probe ... in a letter to Kofi Annan, blasting the U.N. secretary-general and accusing him of "sacrificing" him for his own political gain.
Sevan's lawyer said on Thursday that investigators have concluded that Sevan took kickbacks while he was overseeing the humanitarian operation ...
In an interim report ... the committee concluded that Sevan solicited oil allocations from Saddam's regime ... between 1998 and 2001. It ... accused Sevan of a "grave conflict of interest."
... Volcker's team mentioned $160,000 in "unexplained funds" .... Sevan ... saying it was from an aunt in Cyprus.
(I)nvestigators accused him of lying or changing his testimony when he didn't remember meetings or phone calls
It would be presumptuous, at this early stage, to conclude that the people at the NYT, have not been outscooped.
The current lead item in their Internet edition - yet another story about "Abu Ghraib" - was at last glance on a front page bereft of any reference to the latest UN oil-for--food shambolics.
Naturally, a story about hideous levels of venality and incompetence amongst people charged with running the UN's affairs, in the very act of administering a catastrophic program precursing a momentous event in the history of nations, must outrank - as a news story - hiccoughs on the road to US streamlining it's treatment of internationalist prisoners linked to attacks in a new, unsought and undeclared war.
Particularly where the enemy represented by said prisoners is guilty of flagrant prisoner and civilian abuse and respects no international laws, and where US culpability (but not enemy culpability) has already been fried to death in news stories.
Naturally. Give 'em a chance to catch up with Fox.
