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Diplomatic License
Current Events at the United Nations
Aired March 19, 2004 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KOFI ANNAN, U.N. SECY.-GEN.: I don't think we need to have our reputation impugned. We admit it's highly possible there has been quite a lot of wrong-doing, but we need to investigate.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think it's much of a story at all. I think it's kind of boring, actually.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
RICHARD ROTH, CNN ANCHOR: Icy going for the U.N. Secretary-General this week, Kofi Annan battling a storm of criticism centering on the Iraq- U.N. Oil For Food program.
Welcome to DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth, in New York.
One year after the Iraq War started, the United Nations finds itself under siege under one of those Iraq-related controversies before the war that has refused to go away. Remember the Oil For Food humanitarian program to help Iraqis while they lived under sanctions? Saddam Hussein sold oil. His citizens got help under U.N. auspices.
In recent weeks, some Iraqi Governing Council members accused the United Nations of turning a blind eye to corruption in the system. Newspaper articles, including one written by a former U.N. Oil For Food staff member had blasted the U.N. secretary-general and former Oil For Food director Benon Sevan.
The United Nations has steadfastly denied the allegations, but recently asked people to come forward with any evidence. By week's end, the United Nations was getting more involved with Kofi Annan and Security Council members discussing a more in-depth investigation instead of the in- house probe underway into the complicated Oil For Food program.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANNAN: I think we need to have an independent investigation, an investigation that can be as broad as possible, to look into all these allegations which have been made and get to the bottom of this, because I don't think we need to have our reputation impugned. It's entirely possible there's ben quite a lot of wrongdoing, but we need to investigate and get in and see who was responsible.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: Oil For Food was worth billions of dollars in business contracts. Some U.N. diplomats would like to know more. Others are angry at a rush to judgment.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEAN-MARC DE LA SABLIERE, FRENCH AMB. TO U.N.: We are in favor of transparency, but one should not depart from the basic principle that anyone should be presumed innocent until convicted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: The former Oil For Food executive for the United Nations, Benon Sevan, denies one allegation, that he has received oil vouchers as part of the bribery alleged.
On DIPLOMATIC LICENSE last May here in this very studio, Sevan strongly denounced charges of corruption against the United Nations.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BENON SEVAN, FMR. OIL FOR FOOD DIRECTOR: You tell me we are skimming. Skimming what? What proof do you have to skim anything? I'm very sorry to say, it's very easy to talk, la, la, la, la, la, you know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: While the woman Mr. Sevan was sharply speaking to is Claudia Rosett, freelance journalist, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. And also with us is the former coordinator for the program run from Baghdad at that time, along with Benon Sevan in New York, it's Dennis Halliday, whose based now in New York and in Ireland, teaching at college in Dublin.
Claudia, welcome back.
CLAUDIA ROSETT, JOURNALIST: Thank you.
ROTH: You don't have Benon Sevan sitting next to you, but what is your best proof that you can offer that there was actual criminal behavior committed by the United Nations and its leadership? Or as you also hint in a recent column, just incredible incompetence and not understanding what was going on?
ROSETT: It had to be one or the other. Either they were so completely oblivious to what was obvious corruption, kickbacks, and is now being documented and coming out, including the highly suggestive evidence that Benon Sevan himself received gifts of oil from Saddam.
But either they were so oblivious that they should be entrusted with nothing beyond reenrolling in nursery school, or they were corrupt.
ROTH: Dennis, what did you see there? How do you respond to the criticism?
DENNIS HALLIDAY, FMR. OIL FOR FOOD COORDINATOR: Richard, before I say that, I want to say first of all this is a totally off-target discussion. The scandal is the United Nations sanctions on Iraq, which killed over 1 million people. The scandal is Mr. Bush going to war, preemptive strike against the Iraqi people.
ROTH: Understood. We've discussed those.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: This is a very minor issue, and the fact is, the scandal, if there is one, lies with the member states, not the secretary. It's the member states who setup Oil For Food. They setup the conditions. They monitored. They ran the 661 committee. They knew every damned contract. And they allowed the oil to be.
(CROSSTALK)
ROTH: Then, Claudia, why don't the headlines to your articles say "United States Let Possible Corruption By Middlemen Skimming Off Saddam Take Place While Desperate To Protect Sanctions"?
The articles by you and others make it seem like the United States was helpless. And yet they were there at every meeting. They know everything.
ROSETT: The United States was vetting things and the other members of the Security Council, although perhaps not with great fervor France and Russia, for example, who received a lot of Saddam's business through this program, was basically looking for dual-use items, and I agree. They should have raised the alarm in looking at this, that there were bad things going on here.
ROTH: The United Nations says they can't do anything. They're up to the member states.
ROSETT: That is disingenuous to the extreme. Why on earth then was the United Nations given any job? Why not license it out to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Iowa? After all, the United Nations was not there simply to stamp papers and make sure that Saddam's business deals got done. They were there to supervise this whole thing, to administer it. That's precisely what the secretary.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: You're giving the impression that Oil For Food was run by the United Nations. It was not. Oil For Food was run by the government of Iraq under the auspices and approval of Security Council.
They had the contracts. They did competitive bidding. They sent their selective contract to the 661 committee. It was Washington and London that approved those contracts. Not me. Not Sevan. Not the secretary-general, but the members states.
ROSETT: Then perhaps you can explain what they were getting paid more than $1 billion for doing in this program, out of Saddam's oil revenues.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSETT: What was that paying for?
HALLIDAY: The overhead.
ROSETT: And further, may I ask -- or let me ask another question. If Benon Sevan, as it now appears, was in some way paid by Saddam, what precisely was he being paid to do?
HALLIDAY: I have no knowledge of payments to Benon Sevan or any other staff member.
The fact is, the overhead, which you make it seem very large, in fact it was too large, covered the overhead at UNSCOM, the whole disarmament proposition was financed.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSETT: From 1998 to 2002, there were no weapons inspectors in Iraq. You know that.
HALLIDAY: Do you realize that UNMOVIC during that same period was financed by the Iraq Oil For Food program? While Mr. Blix did nothing for two years, he was paid by Iraq, and the overhead.
(CROSSTALK)
ROTH: There was a staff that was still on call and they were ready to go. That was on the Security Council resolution.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: We had 3,000 Iraqi staff in the country I believe towards the end of the period, in my day. We had 200 or 300 international staff. These cost money. Now, that's excessive. Even worse, and the greater scandal is we took 30 percent off the top of this amount of money and we gave it to compensation to Kuwait.
ROTH: Dennis, do you trust Benon Sevan, who according to documents yet to really be publicly shown to the United Nations, his name is linked to a company. He could have received vouchers of millions of dollars of barrels of oil, whatever.
HALLIDAY: Mr. Sevan is innocent until proven guilty by some court or some other device. I have no knowledge whatsoever of that issue, of any offers he made or offers he did not did not accept.
ROTH: Why do all the articles seem to come from people who hate the United Nations the minute they woke up in the morning, whether they may be right or not? And does that hurt their case, because they pounded the United Nations so much on anything over the years, refusing to maybe criticize the Pentagon or the State Department in other matters?
ROSETT: Well, could I suggest actually there are things I like about the United Nations. I like its coffee shop and I like many of its services as well as providing some sort of information on things overseas.
But when you look at this program, it was a terrible, disastrous thing, and the problem goes beyond was the United Nations simply corrupt. The United Nations gave a seal of approval to a program that allowed Saddam to get right outside the box and salt away, by the new estimate of the General Accounting Office.
ROTH: But the United States government wanted him kept in a box. That's why.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSETT: Let me finish. This is important. At least $10 billion outside of sanctions salted away somewhere. We have not found more than $1 billion of that so far. It may be more. Where is that money and what is it funding? And I ask that especially in reference to the attacks now killing people in Iraq. All of this took place with the United Nations saying things are OK. It's all right.
ROTH: All right -- Dennis.
HALLIDAY: Richard, this attack coming from the right wing of the Republican Party or this country, given the context of the Pentagon and the total abuse of accounting in the Pentagon, the scandals in this country, it's outrageous.
ROTH: All right, Dennis, your name is mentioned by Michael Toussaint (ph), former intern of mine at the CNN office years ago at the United Nations, but an Oil For Food staffer, and he said "Dennis Halliday was always accusing the Security Council of overseeing genocide and kept the focus on that. The regime was meanwhile playing games." And he quotes from a flowery letter from Annan to Mr. Holliday.
Can you defend yourself to this accusation in the "Wall Street Journal"?
HALLIDAY: Yes. I have attacked the Security Council and genocide. That is the definition. Albright confirmed 1/2-million in the middle of the 90's, assert probably a million by the end of the year. I mean this is genocide. This is internationality on the part of member states, the same member states who ran the program, oversaw the program. They knew perfectly well.
You mentioned $10 billion. Let me tell you, $5 billion of that came into the Iraqi coffers through the export of oil into Turkey, Syria and Jordan with the full knowledge of the United States and London and.
(CROSSTALK)
ROTH: In the General Accounting Office this week, you mention, talking about $10 billion in illegal diverting, but half of that was for smuggling, which was really not part of the Oil For Food program, on the Syria, Turkey.
ROSETT: Absolutely, and in this it's absolutely correct that members of the Security Council -- and here I would include not only the United States but France, Russia, China, Britain, all -- should have mentioned -- the permanent five and the rest -- should have said we are seeing smuggling going on. We're seeing all of this. But the secretariat was specifically tasked with every six months reporting that the program was working, and with Kofi Annan signing off.
ROTH: What about Kofi Annan's son? Do you really think -- he worked at a company, it's definitely a fact, worked at a company that later got what the United Nations says was the lowest and best bid to inspect how the Oil For Food money was going on. What do you think?
ROSETT: We do not know the full facts here. The United Nations has not been forthcoming. Kojo Annan, the son, is not an easy person to locate. But it is not a good sign that they got the lowest bid by far. This is a job where you're inspecting good coming into Iraq. If smuggling is an issue, especially with an aggressive, hostile, dangerous regime that's supposed to be contained, you do not necessarily want the cheapest company. You want the must trustworthy. And that would imply that if Kojo Annan was employed by them, it should have been declared at the time. He quit the month they got the contract.
HALLIDAY: I'd have to agree with that. But the member states, the 661 committee who vetted that contract.
ROTH: The sanctions committee.
HALLIDAY: . approved that contract. They're responsible. Not the secretariat, not the Security Council, not Benon Sevan. You've got to put the responsibility where it lies.
ROSETT: You don't think the secretary-general should have at least made this public? Or the secretariat should have said -- they're the ones who said we will accept the contract. They're the ones who actually oversaw the administration of the whole thing. They're the ones who have the authority to release funding from the escrow account, highly secret, by the way, $12 billion or more in.
ROTH: Did you ever meet a middleman skimming while you were involved there?
HALLIDAY: Never. I'm in Baghdad. You're talking about New York. I know I'm a little bit distant from what was happening.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: But to move the responsibility away from the member states, in particular Washington, is nonsense. It's just nonsense.
ROTH: All right, we have to leave it there. Dennis Halliday, teacher, former U.N. employee, fought against smoking at the United Nations, worked with Oil For Food in Baghdad, he teaches in Dublin and he's here in New York and available for any occasion, he's told me. But anyway, thank you very much for being here.
Claudia Rosett, freelance journalist, senior fellow at Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, articles written in the "Wall Street Journal" and elsewhere, with a reappearance here on DIPLOMATIC LICENSE to discuss Oil For Food. Thank you both.
HALLIDAY: Thank you.
ROSETT: Thank you very much.
ROTH: As the United Nations wrestles with the past on Oil For Food, it is ready to go back into Iraq. U.N. advisor Lakhdar Brahimi will join a team ready to help on transition to sovereignty and elections. It's not something he says the United Nations is demanding to do.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LAKHDAR BRAHIMI, U.N. ADVISOR: We are not looking for a job, and we are not dying to go to Iraq. And if the United Nations is not needed, I think that is extremely -- that's perfect, from our point of view. But I think the Iraqis in the Governing Council and out of the Governing Council are overwhelmingly demanding that the United Nations plays a role.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The first question I'm going to ask you, we're going to just jump right into it, actually. Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
HANS BLIX, FMR. U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: You think so? No.
ROTH (voice-over): What a difference if that conclusion was made one year ago. Well, maybe. Former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix assessing Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Blix is touring America, publicizing his new book, "Disarming Iraq."
If it's Tuesday, it must be the United Nations. Take a look at this line of people to get Blix's signature on his new book. You would think they were handing out free documents.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Before the Blix blitz, DIPLOMATIC LICENSE got its own moment with the author.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ROTH: Hans, welcome back. Has it really been a year since the war started? How does it feel? Does it seem like that long?
BLIX: Yes, I think it seems like a long time ago. But on the other hand, of course, things in Iraq are very much current and I follow that.
ROTH: At the New York University appearance that you made, you were introduced as a, quote, "real life hero." Do you feel that way?
BLIX: No, not at all. I feel like someone who did the duty of the Security Council. They told us in resolutions how we were to organize ourselves and what we should do. And we did that.
ROTH: Are you ready to say at this point, now that you know us and know this program very well, that you were right?
BLIX: Well, at any rate we were not wrong. Most others were wrong. They said there are weapons of mass destruction for a fact. Colin Powell said that there was real anthrax, real VX, et cetera, and we said no. There are things unaccounted for. There may be weapons. We didn't deny that. But we didn't assert that there were any.
ROTH: But at one point, you thought, as your book, "Disarming Iraq," describes, you did think that they had weapons of mass destruction.
BLIX: Practically everybody on site thought so in the autumn of 2002, because like everybody else, I watched how the Iraqis had behaved during the 90's. So I think it was natural.
However, as we were beginning to go to sites given to us by intelligence, which intelligence was convinced had weapons of mass destruction, we didn't find any. And then I began to be more skeptical about the intelligence sources and, of course, that turned out to be justified.
ROTH: What made you skeptical as the inspections continued?
BLIX: Well, you see, they come to one site after another and tell you go to this site because we think there is something, and you don't find anything. Then there is something wrong with the sources. Maybe in some cases they had satellite images, and we were able to check that. And I was critical of one case that Colin Powell advanced.
Many other cases, I think they based themselves upon defectors, and the defectors might have told the interrogators what they thought the interrogators wanted to hear, and that was sites with weapons.
ROTH: Cheney told you in a meeting that, listen, we're going to discredit the inspectors no matter what?
BLIX: No, he didn't put it quite that way. There was no note-taker, but I have a diary and I wrote in my diary the same evening that he had said that we will not hesitate to discredit you in favor of disarmament. That was how he put it.
ROTH: Do you think the United States was intent on war no matter what? You mention in your book that you don't really think it was because of some of the reasons, oil as some suspect.
BLIX: The United States is a big place and the U.S. administration is a big place with many different wills. And of course the last resort is the president who decides.
It's quite clear that there were some people in the defense side, from perhaps the vice president, probably the vice president too, who wanted to go to war and probably didn't care at all for a phase of inspections, but the president decided in favor of that. Whether he had been influenced by Blair or by Colin Powell, I don't know, but he decided in favor of inspections and so they had to go through that phase. Perhaps with very little conviction or expectations on the part of the (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
ROTH: What is the damage done to the United Nations, if any, regarding what the United States and Britain achieved or didn't achieve in the Security Council? You talk in the book about how the majority was made to seem wrong or something like that? Go ahead, tell me.
BLIX: I think the authority of the Council was damaged in one way, and in another way it gained. It was damaged in that four countries, three plus one, the United States and United Kingdom and Spain plus Bulgaria -- they wee willing to take it upon themselves to go to war despite the fact that the majority of the council wanted to wait and wanted to have more inspections.
So they really put aside the authority of the majority and the minority -- that I think was damaging to the authority of the Council.
On the other hand, the fact that the majority of the Council showed that they would not go along with such a resolution was a sort of informal vote, and they were right. There was greater wisdom in this. The grounds advanced for an invasion were not really tenable. So I think the majority demonstrated that they had the wisdom.
ROTH: David Kay, who was the U.S. search intelligence replacement for you, so to speak, for America, he was critical, wasn't he, of you, before the war?
Now in the book you note he never really was a former inspector. You said he was a good writer and could speak very well, but I remember him criticizing you in a conversation that you were both in a car, when you were both with the IAEA, and now -- A, have you talked to him?
BLIX: No.
ROTH: B, he's come around and it seems that he now agrees with you, that there were political judgments made that were wrong. What's happened?
BLIX: Well, I'm glad that he has seen some light at the end of the tunnel.
ROTH: Do you think it was a witch hunt -- you used that word in the book -- against you?
BLIX: Not against me, no, no. I think that Iraq was a witch hunt. They were so assured, so absolutely certain that there were weapons of mass destruction. It was a little like the witch hunts of past centuries, that they only wanted to have the evidence, as I said a black cat somewhere. Well, you think that's the evidence of the existence of the witches.
ROTH: So what's the moral of this whole.
BLIX: The moral of the story is that you have to have critical thinking. If you want to sentence someone in a court, you have a witness, you have cross examination. You have critical thinking of that. This is what you need here too.
And we, as inspectors, we would not pass on some intelligence conclusions that there was anthrax, for instance, to the Security Council. That was expected sometimes on the United States side, that (UNINTELLIGIBLE) evidence. Then why don't you give it to the Council. We would like to see the evidence and test the evidence. So we had critical thinking.
We also had the instruction to be critical. We were not in the service of the United States. We were in the service of the Security Council.
ROTH: Isn't there a benefit to the war, though? Look what happened with Libya, the immediate renunciation of weapons.
BLIX: Well, you are jumping to conclusions, Richard, and I am still a skeptical mind. I think it's a fine operation, what the United Kingdom and United States did, but it seems to me more like the result of a long period of containment, of sanctions, and that it was really containment that worked.
However, I don't think it's clear that Qadhafi watched what happened in Iraq, and it could also have given him a push at the end.
ROTH: Your colleague on the nuclear side, Mohammad ElBaradei, now has to deal with Iran. I know you're not dealing with that portfolio. There's been a lot of back and forth about enrichment. What do you think Iran has?
BLIX: Well, it's clear that they have violated the safeguard agreement with IAEA, because they had an obligation to declare all of it and they did not do so. I don't know whether they have declared all of it even now.
But to me, the approach that has been taken by the board of governors, including the United States, is a wise one. That's by trying to get the Iranians to accept a suspension of all enrichment activities, because if you can enrich to 5 percent you can enrich also to 85 percent, and that means bomb-grade. And instead try to give them an assurance that they will have the fuel they will need for their power reactors. I think that seems like a sensible solution. (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
ROTH: Hans Blix, good to see you again. The author of "Disarming Iraq." Was that the original title? I mean, it's very U.N.-like. You didn't want to do "Chasing Saddam," "Saddam's Bluff" or "Look What I Found," any other sexier title or anything?
BLIX: I wanted to do a book that would tell it, as they say, like it is, or like it was.
ROTH: Thanks very much, Hans. Good to see you again. And enjoy the book and the book sales and back home in Sweden and your work in nonproliferation. Thank you.
BLIX: Thank you very much, Richard.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ROTH: Blix was not the first choice of the United Nations. Differences on who should have been the weapons chief caused Kofi Annan to go through at least 20 names. A "New York Times" editorial at the time questioned Blix's toughness, but the Swedish diplomat held tough to the end and was always backed by U.N. chief Anna, who received a copy of Blix's new book Tuesday.
The secretary-general is mentioned, after all.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ROTH: Here it is, the infamous black box, though it's orange, highlighted on last week's program. Any connection to a plane crash in Africa a decade ago? So far, no evidence found, according to the United Nations, that this aviation flight box, which contained cockpit voice recordings, is linked to the 1994 Rwanda plane crash/shoot down, which killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, fueling the genocide in Rwanda.
The tapes were sent to the United States Transportation Agencies in Washington this week for analysis. First listening reveals some voices in French but nothing about the Rwanda crash.
Last week, Kofi Annan called the finding of the box at the United Nations after denials that it existed a first-class foul-up. The box was turned in by someone in Rwanda three months after the crash and a former U.N. staff member in the department that handles gear coming back from Rwanda during a very busy period, who knew of its existence, said this week the United Nations was already told a decade ago there was nothing significant to this box.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The truth is that the National Transportation Safety Board told us there was nothing on the box. So we decided in that case we shouldn't throw the box away. We'll keep it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: The former U.N. official says the U.N. black box is a non- story. Cockpit voice recording study continues in Washington. Stories happening right now in the world coming up next on CNN.
That's DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth in New York. Thanks for watching.
END
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Aired March 19, 2004 - 21:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KOFI ANNAN, U.N. SECY.-GEN.: I don't think we need to have our reputation impugned. We admit it's highly possible there has been quite a lot of wrong-doing, but we need to investigate.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think it's much of a story at all. I think it's kind of boring, actually.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
RICHARD ROTH, CNN ANCHOR: Icy going for the U.N. Secretary-General this week, Kofi Annan battling a storm of criticism centering on the Iraq- U.N. Oil For Food program.
Welcome to DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth, in New York.
One year after the Iraq War started, the United Nations finds itself under siege under one of those Iraq-related controversies before the war that has refused to go away. Remember the Oil For Food humanitarian program to help Iraqis while they lived under sanctions? Saddam Hussein sold oil. His citizens got help under U.N. auspices.
In recent weeks, some Iraqi Governing Council members accused the United Nations of turning a blind eye to corruption in the system. Newspaper articles, including one written by a former U.N. Oil For Food staff member had blasted the U.N. secretary-general and former Oil For Food director Benon Sevan.
The United Nations has steadfastly denied the allegations, but recently asked people to come forward with any evidence. By week's end, the United Nations was getting more involved with Kofi Annan and Security Council members discussing a more in-depth investigation instead of the in- house probe underway into the complicated Oil For Food program.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANNAN: I think we need to have an independent investigation, an investigation that can be as broad as possible, to look into all these allegations which have been made and get to the bottom of this, because I don't think we need to have our reputation impugned. It's entirely possible there's ben quite a lot of wrongdoing, but we need to investigate and get in and see who was responsible.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: Oil For Food was worth billions of dollars in business contracts. Some U.N. diplomats would like to know more. Others are angry at a rush to judgment.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEAN-MARC DE LA SABLIERE, FRENCH AMB. TO U.N.: We are in favor of transparency, but one should not depart from the basic principle that anyone should be presumed innocent until convicted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: The former Oil For Food executive for the United Nations, Benon Sevan, denies one allegation, that he has received oil vouchers as part of the bribery alleged.
On DIPLOMATIC LICENSE last May here in this very studio, Sevan strongly denounced charges of corruption against the United Nations.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BENON SEVAN, FMR. OIL FOR FOOD DIRECTOR: You tell me we are skimming. Skimming what? What proof do you have to skim anything? I'm very sorry to say, it's very easy to talk, la, la, la, la, la, you know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: While the woman Mr. Sevan was sharply speaking to is Claudia Rosett, freelance journalist, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. And also with us is the former coordinator for the program run from Baghdad at that time, along with Benon Sevan in New York, it's Dennis Halliday, whose based now in New York and in Ireland, teaching at college in Dublin.
Claudia, welcome back.
CLAUDIA ROSETT, JOURNALIST: Thank you.
ROTH: You don't have Benon Sevan sitting next to you, but what is your best proof that you can offer that there was actual criminal behavior committed by the United Nations and its leadership? Or as you also hint in a recent column, just incredible incompetence and not understanding what was going on?
ROSETT: It had to be one or the other. Either they were so completely oblivious to what was obvious corruption, kickbacks, and is now being documented and coming out, including the highly suggestive evidence that Benon Sevan himself received gifts of oil from Saddam.
But either they were so oblivious that they should be entrusted with nothing beyond reenrolling in nursery school, or they were corrupt.
ROTH: Dennis, what did you see there? How do you respond to the criticism?
DENNIS HALLIDAY, FMR. OIL FOR FOOD COORDINATOR: Richard, before I say that, I want to say first of all this is a totally off-target discussion. The scandal is the United Nations sanctions on Iraq, which killed over 1 million people. The scandal is Mr. Bush going to war, preemptive strike against the Iraqi people.
ROTH: Understood. We've discussed those.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: This is a very minor issue, and the fact is, the scandal, if there is one, lies with the member states, not the secretary. It's the member states who setup Oil For Food. They setup the conditions. They monitored. They ran the 661 committee. They knew every damned contract. And they allowed the oil to be.
(CROSSTALK)
ROTH: Then, Claudia, why don't the headlines to your articles say "United States Let Possible Corruption By Middlemen Skimming Off Saddam Take Place While Desperate To Protect Sanctions"?
The articles by you and others make it seem like the United States was helpless. And yet they were there at every meeting. They know everything.
ROSETT: The United States was vetting things and the other members of the Security Council, although perhaps not with great fervor France and Russia, for example, who received a lot of Saddam's business through this program, was basically looking for dual-use items, and I agree. They should have raised the alarm in looking at this, that there were bad things going on here.
ROTH: The United Nations says they can't do anything. They're up to the member states.
ROSETT: That is disingenuous to the extreme. Why on earth then was the United Nations given any job? Why not license it out to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Iowa? After all, the United Nations was not there simply to stamp papers and make sure that Saddam's business deals got done. They were there to supervise this whole thing, to administer it. That's precisely what the secretary.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: You're giving the impression that Oil For Food was run by the United Nations. It was not. Oil For Food was run by the government of Iraq under the auspices and approval of Security Council.
They had the contracts. They did competitive bidding. They sent their selective contract to the 661 committee. It was Washington and London that approved those contracts. Not me. Not Sevan. Not the secretary-general, but the members states.
ROSETT: Then perhaps you can explain what they were getting paid more than $1 billion for doing in this program, out of Saddam's oil revenues.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSETT: What was that paying for?
HALLIDAY: The overhead.
ROSETT: And further, may I ask -- or let me ask another question. If Benon Sevan, as it now appears, was in some way paid by Saddam, what precisely was he being paid to do?
HALLIDAY: I have no knowledge of payments to Benon Sevan or any other staff member.
The fact is, the overhead, which you make it seem very large, in fact it was too large, covered the overhead at UNSCOM, the whole disarmament proposition was financed.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSETT: From 1998 to 2002, there were no weapons inspectors in Iraq. You know that.
HALLIDAY: Do you realize that UNMOVIC during that same period was financed by the Iraq Oil For Food program? While Mr. Blix did nothing for two years, he was paid by Iraq, and the overhead.
(CROSSTALK)
ROTH: There was a staff that was still on call and they were ready to go. That was on the Security Council resolution.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: We had 3,000 Iraqi staff in the country I believe towards the end of the period, in my day. We had 200 or 300 international staff. These cost money. Now, that's excessive. Even worse, and the greater scandal is we took 30 percent off the top of this amount of money and we gave it to compensation to Kuwait.
ROTH: Dennis, do you trust Benon Sevan, who according to documents yet to really be publicly shown to the United Nations, his name is linked to a company. He could have received vouchers of millions of dollars of barrels of oil, whatever.
HALLIDAY: Mr. Sevan is innocent until proven guilty by some court or some other device. I have no knowledge whatsoever of that issue, of any offers he made or offers he did not did not accept.
ROTH: Why do all the articles seem to come from people who hate the United Nations the minute they woke up in the morning, whether they may be right or not? And does that hurt their case, because they pounded the United Nations so much on anything over the years, refusing to maybe criticize the Pentagon or the State Department in other matters?
ROSETT: Well, could I suggest actually there are things I like about the United Nations. I like its coffee shop and I like many of its services as well as providing some sort of information on things overseas.
But when you look at this program, it was a terrible, disastrous thing, and the problem goes beyond was the United Nations simply corrupt. The United Nations gave a seal of approval to a program that allowed Saddam to get right outside the box and salt away, by the new estimate of the General Accounting Office.
ROTH: But the United States government wanted him kept in a box. That's why.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSETT: Let me finish. This is important. At least $10 billion outside of sanctions salted away somewhere. We have not found more than $1 billion of that so far. It may be more. Where is that money and what is it funding? And I ask that especially in reference to the attacks now killing people in Iraq. All of this took place with the United Nations saying things are OK. It's all right.
ROTH: All right -- Dennis.
HALLIDAY: Richard, this attack coming from the right wing of the Republican Party or this country, given the context of the Pentagon and the total abuse of accounting in the Pentagon, the scandals in this country, it's outrageous.
ROTH: All right, Dennis, your name is mentioned by Michael Toussaint (ph), former intern of mine at the CNN office years ago at the United Nations, but an Oil For Food staffer, and he said "Dennis Halliday was always accusing the Security Council of overseeing genocide and kept the focus on that. The regime was meanwhile playing games." And he quotes from a flowery letter from Annan to Mr. Holliday.
Can you defend yourself to this accusation in the "Wall Street Journal"?
HALLIDAY: Yes. I have attacked the Security Council and genocide. That is the definition. Albright confirmed 1/2-million in the middle of the 90's, assert probably a million by the end of the year. I mean this is genocide. This is internationality on the part of member states, the same member states who ran the program, oversaw the program. They knew perfectly well.
You mentioned $10 billion. Let me tell you, $5 billion of that came into the Iraqi coffers through the export of oil into Turkey, Syria and Jordan with the full knowledge of the United States and London and.
(CROSSTALK)
ROTH: In the General Accounting Office this week, you mention, talking about $10 billion in illegal diverting, but half of that was for smuggling, which was really not part of the Oil For Food program, on the Syria, Turkey.
ROSETT: Absolutely, and in this it's absolutely correct that members of the Security Council -- and here I would include not only the United States but France, Russia, China, Britain, all -- should have mentioned -- the permanent five and the rest -- should have said we are seeing smuggling going on. We're seeing all of this. But the secretariat was specifically tasked with every six months reporting that the program was working, and with Kofi Annan signing off.
ROTH: What about Kofi Annan's son? Do you really think -- he worked at a company, it's definitely a fact, worked at a company that later got what the United Nations says was the lowest and best bid to inspect how the Oil For Food money was going on. What do you think?
ROSETT: We do not know the full facts here. The United Nations has not been forthcoming. Kojo Annan, the son, is not an easy person to locate. But it is not a good sign that they got the lowest bid by far. This is a job where you're inspecting good coming into Iraq. If smuggling is an issue, especially with an aggressive, hostile, dangerous regime that's supposed to be contained, you do not necessarily want the cheapest company. You want the must trustworthy. And that would imply that if Kojo Annan was employed by them, it should have been declared at the time. He quit the month they got the contract.
HALLIDAY: I'd have to agree with that. But the member states, the 661 committee who vetted that contract.
ROTH: The sanctions committee.
HALLIDAY: . approved that contract. They're responsible. Not the secretariat, not the Security Council, not Benon Sevan. You've got to put the responsibility where it lies.
ROSETT: You don't think the secretary-general should have at least made this public? Or the secretariat should have said -- they're the ones who said we will accept the contract. They're the ones who actually oversaw the administration of the whole thing. They're the ones who have the authority to release funding from the escrow account, highly secret, by the way, $12 billion or more in.
ROTH: Did you ever meet a middleman skimming while you were involved there?
HALLIDAY: Never. I'm in Baghdad. You're talking about New York. I know I'm a little bit distant from what was happening.
(CROSSTALK)
HALLIDAY: But to move the responsibility away from the member states, in particular Washington, is nonsense. It's just nonsense.
ROTH: All right, we have to leave it there. Dennis Halliday, teacher, former U.N. employee, fought against smoking at the United Nations, worked with Oil For Food in Baghdad, he teaches in Dublin and he's here in New York and available for any occasion, he's told me. But anyway, thank you very much for being here.
Claudia Rosett, freelance journalist, senior fellow at Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, articles written in the "Wall Street Journal" and elsewhere, with a reappearance here on DIPLOMATIC LICENSE to discuss Oil For Food. Thank you both.
HALLIDAY: Thank you.
ROSETT: Thank you very much.
ROTH: As the United Nations wrestles with the past on Oil For Food, it is ready to go back into Iraq. U.N. advisor Lakhdar Brahimi will join a team ready to help on transition to sovereignty and elections. It's not something he says the United Nations is demanding to do.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LAKHDAR BRAHIMI, U.N. ADVISOR: We are not looking for a job, and we are not dying to go to Iraq. And if the United Nations is not needed, I think that is extremely -- that's perfect, from our point of view. But I think the Iraqis in the Governing Council and out of the Governing Council are overwhelmingly demanding that the United Nations plays a role.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The first question I'm going to ask you, we're going to just jump right into it, actually. Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
HANS BLIX, FMR. U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: You think so? No.
ROTH (voice-over): What a difference if that conclusion was made one year ago. Well, maybe. Former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix assessing Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Blix is touring America, publicizing his new book, "Disarming Iraq."
If it's Tuesday, it must be the United Nations. Take a look at this line of people to get Blix's signature on his new book. You would think they were handing out free documents.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Before the Blix blitz, DIPLOMATIC LICENSE got its own moment with the author.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ROTH: Hans, welcome back. Has it really been a year since the war started? How does it feel? Does it seem like that long?
BLIX: Yes, I think it seems like a long time ago. But on the other hand, of course, things in Iraq are very much current and I follow that.
ROTH: At the New York University appearance that you made, you were introduced as a, quote, "real life hero." Do you feel that way?
BLIX: No, not at all. I feel like someone who did the duty of the Security Council. They told us in resolutions how we were to organize ourselves and what we should do. And we did that.
ROTH: Are you ready to say at this point, now that you know us and know this program very well, that you were right?
BLIX: Well, at any rate we were not wrong. Most others were wrong. They said there are weapons of mass destruction for a fact. Colin Powell said that there was real anthrax, real VX, et cetera, and we said no. There are things unaccounted for. There may be weapons. We didn't deny that. But we didn't assert that there were any.
ROTH: But at one point, you thought, as your book, "Disarming Iraq," describes, you did think that they had weapons of mass destruction.
BLIX: Practically everybody on site thought so in the autumn of 2002, because like everybody else, I watched how the Iraqis had behaved during the 90's. So I think it was natural.
However, as we were beginning to go to sites given to us by intelligence, which intelligence was convinced had weapons of mass destruction, we didn't find any. And then I began to be more skeptical about the intelligence sources and, of course, that turned out to be justified.
ROTH: What made you skeptical as the inspections continued?
BLIX: Well, you see, they come to one site after another and tell you go to this site because we think there is something, and you don't find anything. Then there is something wrong with the sources. Maybe in some cases they had satellite images, and we were able to check that. And I was critical of one case that Colin Powell advanced.
Many other cases, I think they based themselves upon defectors, and the defectors might have told the interrogators what they thought the interrogators wanted to hear, and that was sites with weapons.
ROTH: Cheney told you in a meeting that, listen, we're going to discredit the inspectors no matter what?
BLIX: No, he didn't put it quite that way. There was no note-taker, but I have a diary and I wrote in my diary the same evening that he had said that we will not hesitate to discredit you in favor of disarmament. That was how he put it.
ROTH: Do you think the United States was intent on war no matter what? You mention in your book that you don't really think it was because of some of the reasons, oil as some suspect.
BLIX: The United States is a big place and the U.S. administration is a big place with many different wills. And of course the last resort is the president who decides.
It's quite clear that there were some people in the defense side, from perhaps the vice president, probably the vice president too, who wanted to go to war and probably didn't care at all for a phase of inspections, but the president decided in favor of that. Whether he had been influenced by Blair or by Colin Powell, I don't know, but he decided in favor of inspections and so they had to go through that phase. Perhaps with very little conviction or expectations on the part of the (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
ROTH: What is the damage done to the United Nations, if any, regarding what the United States and Britain achieved or didn't achieve in the Security Council? You talk in the book about how the majority was made to seem wrong or something like that? Go ahead, tell me.
BLIX: I think the authority of the Council was damaged in one way, and in another way it gained. It was damaged in that four countries, three plus one, the United States and United Kingdom and Spain plus Bulgaria -- they wee willing to take it upon themselves to go to war despite the fact that the majority of the council wanted to wait and wanted to have more inspections.
So they really put aside the authority of the majority and the minority -- that I think was damaging to the authority of the Council.
On the other hand, the fact that the majority of the Council showed that they would not go along with such a resolution was a sort of informal vote, and they were right. There was greater wisdom in this. The grounds advanced for an invasion were not really tenable. So I think the majority demonstrated that they had the wisdom.
ROTH: David Kay, who was the U.S. search intelligence replacement for you, so to speak, for America, he was critical, wasn't he, of you, before the war?
Now in the book you note he never really was a former inspector. You said he was a good writer and could speak very well, but I remember him criticizing you in a conversation that you were both in a car, when you were both with the IAEA, and now -- A, have you talked to him?
BLIX: No.
ROTH: B, he's come around and it seems that he now agrees with you, that there were political judgments made that were wrong. What's happened?
BLIX: Well, I'm glad that he has seen some light at the end of the tunnel.
ROTH: Do you think it was a witch hunt -- you used that word in the book -- against you?
BLIX: Not against me, no, no. I think that Iraq was a witch hunt. They were so assured, so absolutely certain that there were weapons of mass destruction. It was a little like the witch hunts of past centuries, that they only wanted to have the evidence, as I said a black cat somewhere. Well, you think that's the evidence of the existence of the witches.
ROTH: So what's the moral of this whole.
BLIX: The moral of the story is that you have to have critical thinking. If you want to sentence someone in a court, you have a witness, you have cross examination. You have critical thinking of that. This is what you need here too.
And we, as inspectors, we would not pass on some intelligence conclusions that there was anthrax, for instance, to the Security Council. That was expected sometimes on the United States side, that (UNINTELLIGIBLE) evidence. Then why don't you give it to the Council. We would like to see the evidence and test the evidence. So we had critical thinking.
We also had the instruction to be critical. We were not in the service of the United States. We were in the service of the Security Council.
ROTH: Isn't there a benefit to the war, though? Look what happened with Libya, the immediate renunciation of weapons.
BLIX: Well, you are jumping to conclusions, Richard, and I am still a skeptical mind. I think it's a fine operation, what the United Kingdom and United States did, but it seems to me more like the result of a long period of containment, of sanctions, and that it was really containment that worked.
However, I don't think it's clear that Qadhafi watched what happened in Iraq, and it could also have given him a push at the end.
ROTH: Your colleague on the nuclear side, Mohammad ElBaradei, now has to deal with Iran. I know you're not dealing with that portfolio. There's been a lot of back and forth about enrichment. What do you think Iran has?
BLIX: Well, it's clear that they have violated the safeguard agreement with IAEA, because they had an obligation to declare all of it and they did not do so. I don't know whether they have declared all of it even now.
But to me, the approach that has been taken by the board of governors, including the United States, is a wise one. That's by trying to get the Iranians to accept a suspension of all enrichment activities, because if you can enrich to 5 percent you can enrich also to 85 percent, and that means bomb-grade. And instead try to give them an assurance that they will have the fuel they will need for their power reactors. I think that seems like a sensible solution. (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
ROTH: Hans Blix, good to see you again. The author of "Disarming Iraq." Was that the original title? I mean, it's very U.N.-like. You didn't want to do "Chasing Saddam," "Saddam's Bluff" or "Look What I Found," any other sexier title or anything?
BLIX: I wanted to do a book that would tell it, as they say, like it is, or like it was.
ROTH: Thanks very much, Hans. Good to see you again. And enjoy the book and the book sales and back home in Sweden and your work in nonproliferation. Thank you.
BLIX: Thank you very much, Richard.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ROTH: Blix was not the first choice of the United Nations. Differences on who should have been the weapons chief caused Kofi Annan to go through at least 20 names. A "New York Times" editorial at the time questioned Blix's toughness, but the Swedish diplomat held tough to the end and was always backed by U.N. chief Anna, who received a copy of Blix's new book Tuesday.
The secretary-general is mentioned, after all.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ROTH: Here it is, the infamous black box, though it's orange, highlighted on last week's program. Any connection to a plane crash in Africa a decade ago? So far, no evidence found, according to the United Nations, that this aviation flight box, which contained cockpit voice recordings, is linked to the 1994 Rwanda plane crash/shoot down, which killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, fueling the genocide in Rwanda.
The tapes were sent to the United States Transportation Agencies in Washington this week for analysis. First listening reveals some voices in French but nothing about the Rwanda crash.
Last week, Kofi Annan called the finding of the box at the United Nations after denials that it existed a first-class foul-up. The box was turned in by someone in Rwanda three months after the crash and a former U.N. staff member in the department that handles gear coming back from Rwanda during a very busy period, who knew of its existence, said this week the United Nations was already told a decade ago there was nothing significant to this box.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The truth is that the National Transportation Safety Board told us there was nothing on the box. So we decided in that case we shouldn't throw the box away. We'll keep it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROTH: The former U.N. official says the U.N. black box is a non- story. Cockpit voice recording study continues in Washington. Stories happening right now in the world coming up next on CNN.
That's DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth in New York. Thanks for watching.
END
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