Marc Rich, the UN, and Bill Clinton

Captain Ed fished out an interesting name from the Fox News report on the report by Charles Duelfer on the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Amid all the kickback schemes at work among the French, Russians, and Chinese, the name Marc Rich pops up. You'll recall that Rich was among the assorted bad guys pardoned by Bill Clinton in January 2001 during the last days of his administration.

According to Fox:

"The most lucrative exploitation of the program involved kickbacks from companies executing legal sales of oil. Under the terms of the U.N resolution establishing the program, Iraq maintained the right to determine who got contracts for oil being exported and the humanitarian goods being imported and to determine market prices.

"In what the report calls, 'an open secret,' the Iraqi government demanded illicit surcharges of 25-to-30 cents on all barrels of oil bought, which buyers had to secretly pay before the deals were sealed. They complied because the Iraqis were selling slightly below market prices.

"One of the most prolific purchasers of the oil was Swiss-based Glencore run by one-time fugitive American financier Marc Rich, which the report alleges paid over $3.2 million in kickbacks to the Iraqi government. Rich, formerly wanted for tax-evasion was pardoned by President Clinton in his last days in office."

As the Captain says, this raises a new set of questions about Clinton's possible involvement in the scheme, or at least shows that he might have had knowledge of it:

"At the time, the presumption was that Rich's wife had donated enough money to buy the pardon. Now, however, the question may be whether Clinton knew about the corruption and feared that an aggressive Bush administration policy would uncover Rich's participation in undermining Iraqi sanctions while Rich raised funds for both his presidential library and Hillary's election. Or maybe the issue runs even deeper than that? (hat tip: G Gotway)"

The scheme itself is receiving a great deal of attention today. The WSJ weighs in with a lead editorial that begins:

"Judging from the current Iraq debate, you might think Saddam Hussein didn't use poison gas on the Kurds and the Iranians in the 1980s. Or that 500,000 American troops hadn't been sent to the Gulf in 1990-91 to reverse his invasion of Kuwait. Or that Saddam hadn't tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in 1993, or long harbored one of the bombers who attacked the World Trade Center that year.

"It might also be easy to forget that Saddam never came clean about his weapons of mass destruction, resulting in Bill Clinton's Desert Fox bombing of 1998 and the ejection of U.N. inspectors. Or that he necessitated a huge U.S. troop presence in the region, which Osama bin Laden cited in his 1998 fatwa as one of his primary grievances against America."

Hindrocket at Power Line nails corrupt AP reporter Scott Lindlaw, the man who invented the booing crowd story earlier this fall. This round, Lindlaw (who has never been reprimanded for his earlier fabrication, in spite of the AP's withdrawal of the story) mischaracterizes the President's reaction to the Duelfer report (officially the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD). Check out Hindrocket's analysis.

Mark Steyn offers perhaps the best commentary on the report I've encountered (no surprise there) -- and he did it six months ago, as he reminds us this morning. He prefaces his older piece with this:

"Don't take the word of your lazy rolling-news update anchor or the AP rewrite guy on the Duelfer findings on Iraq. Instead, read the report for yourself. It is an amazing document. It renders John Kerry, on foreign policy and national security, either a complacent fool or an utter fraud. It's not about WMD, it's about the top-to-toe corruption of the entire international system by Saddam Hussein. The 'global test' is a racket, and anybody who puts faith in it is jeopardizing America's national security. If the lazy US media won't pick up this story now, shame on them."

Finally, if you haven't been reading Claudia Rosett's columns on the U.N. these many months, you'll find a list of them here. She's the authoritative source on UN-scam.