We now have one reason why the White House forgery team could have set up Newsweek about the Koran in the toilet - to divert from this story
Tuesday's Guardian reports that a report issued by the Democratic staff on the "Senate investigations committee" reveals that US oil purchses accounted for 52% of the kickbacks received by the Saddam regime.
The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.
Bush was aware of this, ignored it and worse....
"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales."
The Guardian names the company involved and how they did it
Yesterday's report makes two principal allegations against the Bush administration. Firstly, it found the US treasury failed to take action against a Texas oil company, Bayoil, which facilitated payment of "at least $37m in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime".
The surcharges were a violation of the UN Oil For Food programme, by which Iraq was allowed to sell heavily discounted oil to raise money for food and humanitarian supplies. However, Saddam was allowed to choose which companies were given the highly lucrative oil contracts. Between September 2000 and September 2002 (when the practice was stopped) the regime demanded kickbacks of 10 to 30 US cents a barrel in return for oil allocations.
In addition to the abuses of the OFF program,
the US military and the state department gave a tacit green light for shipments of nearly 8m barrels of oil bought by Jordan
Despite the well publicised allegations against individuals, the UN tried to investigate the abuses but were hamstrung by the US Treasury..
The report details a series of efforts by UN monitors to obtain information about Bayoil's oil shipments in 2001 and 2002, and the lack of help provided by the US treasury.
After repeated requests over eight months from the UN and the US state department, the treasury's office of foreign assets control wrote to Bayoil in May 2002, requesting a report on its transactions but did not "request specific information by UN or direct Bayoil to answer the UN's questions".