Oil-for-Food Investigation Wants Answers From Bremer

Oil-for-Food Investigation Wants Answers From Bremer
Friday, June 25, 2004

Just days before he is due to leave Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer is facing new accusations that he is hindering, rather than helping, the oil-for-food investigation.

Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., wrote Bremer a letter in May requesting answers to a series of questions about Bremer's handling of the oil-for-food investigation. Bremer recently responded to that letter and, according to Shays, there are many questions left unanswered.

“The response is incomplete," Shays said in a statement Wednesday. "There is still an insufficient accounting of relevant documents in custody. Several questions and requests are simply unanswered."

• Raw Data: Shays' Letter to Bremer | Bremer's Response (pdfs)

Shays said that contracts with the accounting firms Ernst & Young and KPMG, a memorandum of understanding between the Iraq Board of Supreme Audit and the U.N. Independent Inquiry Committee, and an inventory of oil-for-food documents in the CPA's possession have not been supplied.

“The Subcommittee will continue to pursue these matters because documents and information in the hands of U.S. government agencies, like the CPA, are critical to finding the truth about what went so very wrong with the U.N. oil-for-food program," Shays said.

In his letter to Shays, Bremer says that the CPA isn't even the organization that Shays should be contacting with oil-for-food-related questions.

While the CPA "shares the Subcommittee's interest in this serious matter," Bremer wrote, "the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit is best prepared to conduct such an investigation, in view of its legal status as a separate and independent public agency ... and the fact that it will continue to function as Iraq's highest public audit organization following the transfer of governance authority to the Iraqi interim government."

In addition to the questioning from Shays, Bremer is also under pressure from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has sent a formal letter to him requesting that he hand over oil-for-food documents.

And in another sign that U.S. authorities are beginning to move more aggressively, the subcommittee chairman Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., has served a subpoena on BNP Paribas, the bank that handled billions of dollars of oil-for-food money.

David Kelley, U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, is also seeking information on the oil-for-food program, serving subpoenas on Chevron Texaco, Exxon Mobil and Valero Energy Corp., to find out more about Iraqi oil purchases.

A three-member panel led by Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, is investigating the oil-for-food scandal. The panel does not have subpoena authority and will rely instead on voluntary cooperation from governments, U.N. staff, members of Saddam Hussein's former government and current Iraqi leaders.

The panel says it has evidence that dozens of people, including top U.N. officials, took kickbacks from the $67 billion oil-for-food program.

The General Accounting Office, the U.S. Congress' investigative arm, estimated in March that the Iraqi government pocketed $5.7 billion by smuggling oil to its neighbors and $4.4 billion by extracting kickbacks on otherwise legitimate contracts.

Under the oil-for-food program, which began in December 1996 and officially ended in November 2003, Saddam's government could sell unlimited quantities of oil provided the money went primarily to buy humanitarian goods and toward reparations to 1991 Gulf War victims.

FOX News' Jonathan Hunt contributed to this report.

Clinton First Linked Al-Qaeda to Saddam

More than 3000 civilians died in a matter of hours when three planes were hijacked and crashed into The World Trade Center in NYC, The Pentagon in Washington DC, and an open field in Shanksville PA on 9/11.

Al-Qaeda. The terrorists of Al-Qaeda have made Iraq their nest. Rooting them out. This is war. It ain't pretty.

Clinton First Linked Al-Qaeda to Saddam
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 25, 2004

The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.

The issue arose again this month after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported there was no "collaborative relationship" between the old Iraqi regime and bin Laden.

Democrats have cited the staff report to accuse Mr. Bush of making inaccurate statements about a linkage. Commission members, including a Democrat and two Republicans, quickly came to the administration's defense by saying there had been such contacts.

In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

Mr. Bush cited the linkage, in part, to justify invading Iraq and ousting Saddam. He said he could not take the risk of Iraq's weapons falling into bin Laden's hands.

The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.

The 1998 indictment said: "Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Shortly after the embassy bombings, Mr. Clinton ordered air strikes on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and on the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

To justify the Sudanese plant as a target, Clinton aides said it was involved in the production of deadly VX nerve gas. Officials further determined that bin Laden owned a stake in the operation and that its manager had traveled to Baghdad to learn bomb-making techniques from Saddam's weapons scientists.

Mr. Cohen elaborated in March in testimony before the September 11 commission.

He testified that "bin Laden had been living [at the plant], that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program."

He said that if the plant had been allowed to produce VX that was used to kill thousands of Americans, people would have asked him, " 'You had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least the corporation, and you had traces of [VX precursor] and you did what? And you did nothing?' Is that a responsible activity on the part of the secretary of defense?"