AMY GOODMAN: Joy Gordon, you are a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, completing a book on the sanctions program in Iraq and your piece in Harpers begins, "The Bush Administration was still reeling from the revelations about Abu Ghraib prison this year when supporters of the President suddenly took note of a dramatic new scandal involving Iraq. 'The richest rip-off in world history,' wrote William Safire." Can you talk about your take on what's happening?
JOY GORDON: Sure. I actually think that this thing with Cotecna is something of a red herring. If you look at, well, and if you look at how the accusations are typically framed, it's the U.N. failed to do this or how could the U.N. have done nothing in the face of the smuggling and kickback. In fact, what's crucial here is to make a distinction about the different entries within the U.N. There's a difference between the Security Council and the Secretariat, and many of the policies that permitted the smuggling and kickback to take place were, cannot be laid at the feet of the Secretary General. They are the policies of the Security Council and the Secretary General has no control over the Security Council. And if we look at the claim that the U.N. failed to catch contracts with pricing irregularities, well again, that goes to the Security Council whose job was to review all of these contracts and if we look at the policies and the failures of, that are now being laid at the feet of the United Nations, many of them, in fact, are due not only to the Security Council but to particular members within the Security Council. For many of these things, the policy for example that allowed the Iraqi government to choose who it would trade with, well that was a Security Council Resolution 986 in combination with a Security Council-approved memorandum of understanding. And the member states, including the United States, were in support of that. If we look at the committees, if we look at the Council's failure to block contracts with pricing irregularities, and it was the Security Council's responsibility, not the Oil-For-Food staff, they did not have the authority to block contracts, only to present information to the Security Council, then in fact what we see is none of the members of the Security Council, including the United States, chose to block contracts where there were obvious price irregularities, even when U.N. staff presented that information with documentation to them.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Joy Gordon, author of among her pieces, "The U.N. Is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner," and Claudia Rosett, who has exposed this story in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun. We want to turn now to Denis Halliday. He was in our studios about a week ago, the former Assistant U.N. Secretary General who was in charge of the Oil-For-Food program. This is what he had to say about it.
DENIS HALLIDAY: I think it's because the U.N. has become irritating. The Secretary General has finally woken up to his responsibility and has announced that the war is illegal, which has sort of threatened the United States I think, and Britain perhaps. And the old frustration of the neo-con right wing who feels the U.N. is a threat, international law is unacceptable. Its part of the rejection by the Bush regime of Kyoto, of the ICC, of all the other international laws which the rest of us in the world feel are so important, but are rejected by Congress, because they feel it impinges on the constitution and their function, and so on.
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