Forgive me if people are already aware of this bit. I only found one reference to it in all of dkos. This whole scandal goes well beyond simple under the table oil selling and attempts to blackmail the UN.
Did BayOil itself send money straight to the arms dealer who was supplying Saddam with cluster bombs?
Update [2005-5-18 16:43:13 by propagandism]: Thanks to everyone who has recommended this, my first dkos diary!
From The Houston Chronicle.
The report, which Republicans were still reviewing Monday, says Saddam's regime purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cluster bombs from Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms maker, racking up massive debts in the process.
To help produce his bombs, Cardoen hired Augusto Giangrandi, a one-time resident of Florida with dual Italian-Chilean citizenship, to ship zirconium from the United States to Chile, the report said.
Because Saddam could not pay cash, Giangrandi traveled to Baghdad to work out a deal and brought in BayOil owner David Chalmers Jr.
The pair negotiated a deal where Iraq's oil marketing company would supply oil to BayOil. The Houston company paid for part of the value of the barrels and sent the remainder to Cardoen.
"This arrangement, in effect, allowed Iraq to trade oil for cluster bombs," the report said.
Can we move past the "Oil for Food" investigations of Kofi Annan and get down to some war crimes trials against bastards like these please?