Oil for Terror

national review is on to something...more precisely, claudia rosett:

"As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, there were two glaring flaws that lent themselves to manipulation by Saddam. One was the U.N. decision to allow Saddam to choose his own buyers of oil and suppliers of goods — an arrangement that Annan himself helped set up during negotiations in Baghdad in the mid-1990s, shortly before he was promoted to Secretary-General. The other problem was the U.N.'s policy of treating Saddam's deals as highly confidential, putting deference to Saddam's privacy above the public's right to know. Even the Iraqi people were denied access to the most basic information about the deals that were in theory being done in their name. The identities of the contractors, the amounts paid, the quantity and quality of goods, the sums, fees, interest, and precise transactions involved in the BNP Paribas bank accounts — all were kept confidential between Saddam and the U.N.

With Saddam allowed to assemble a secret roster of favorite business partners, the only hope of preserving any integrity under Oil-for-Food was that the U.N. would ferociously monitor every deal, and veto anything remotely suspect. Instead, the Security Council looked for weapons-related goods; the Secretariat looked for ways to expand the program (while collecting its three-percent commission on Saddam's oil sales); and Saddam looked for — and found — ways to pervert the program."
-------------------------
what they are getting at is not complex, although the article seems extremely murky.
basically this is the deal:

1) the oil for food project meant that saddam chose the companies that could supply his country with goods.
2) the UN looked only for weapons suppliers and goods
3) the companies could have supplied the UN/iraq with actual goods for fair profit, but would be connected to terror
4) 100 B is spent on the program, via the UN.
5) Al Queda becomes financial viable around the same time
6) many of the suppliers are well known terrorist intermediaries.

see the problem now? yes, this does deserve scrutiny. the UN is fundamentall flawed.