It appears that the Bush administration was deeply complicit in the Oil for Food Program smuggling operations.
According to the Reuters story "US Approved Saddam's Biggest Oil Smuggling", the US facilitated oil smuggling on a grand scale in the weeks leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
While U.S. Navy ships were patrolling the Gulf in February 2003, making a show of boarding and searching leaky dhows and small ships, they turned a blind eye to tankers carrying some $54 million of Iraqi oil on Jordan's behalf, the report said.
A total of 7.7 million barrels of oil was smuggled through the Khor al-Amaya oil terminal in at least seven shipments in February and March 2003, it said.
The sales were arranged by a businessman in Jordan named "Mr Shaheen" who told an Iraqi official he had "the Pentagon in one pocket and the CIA in the other." He was acting for Jordan, a close U.S. ally.
The oil was bought at a heavily discounted price of around $7 a barrel, the report said. If it had been sold at fair market value within the oil-for-food program
it could have earned some $200 million to buy humanitarian goods.
"The illegal sales of oil from Khor al-Amaya came at a staggering cost to the program in terms of potential revenue foregone," the report said.
The 1,000 page report showed shipping records from a tanker that lifted the oil, including voyage instructions for the ship's captain saying the U.S. Navy was "already aware about your passage and itinerary."
The investigation, established by the United Nations and headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said the Khor al-Amaya smuggling in early 2003 was "the single largest episode of oil smuggling" under the oil-for-food program and occurred "with the approval of the United States government."
"The governments of Jordan and the United States have declined the Committee's requests for interviews and information concerning the smuggling of oil from Khor al-Amaya," the report said.
Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, who released similar information earlier this year, said the report showed Washington did not do enough to curb American companies involved in smuggling oil from Iraq.
"Tolerating these illicit oil sales was a mistake that cannot simply be laid at the feet of U.N. officials, but should be acknowledged by the United States and other Security Council members," Levin said.
Is there a way to find out who received the oil shipments? Who pocketed the $193 million difference between the $7bbl price paid and the market price? Which Cheney-affiliated oil companies sold that oil on to American and European markets at huge profits as the oil price spiked on news of the invasion of Iraq?
I hope Carl Levin keeps digging. Send him some love for the work he did on this in the spring and encourage him to find out where the oil was delivered.
Oh, and I suggest that every time we write our representatives and our senators that we suggest that they refuse to vote on anything - and especially on the Supreme Court nominations - unless the Bush administration complies with requests for production of documents. I don't know about you but I am sick of reading that the administration is withholding documents as a cover up to its criminal enterprise.