December 27, 2005
Waiting For Real Aid
Mark Steyn with another great column, this one on the tsunami vs the bullshit rhetorical hypocritical useless windbag response by bullshit rhetorical useless windbag United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland and his colleagues at the U.N.
It’s one thing to invent humanitarian disasters to disparage President Bush’s unilateralist warmongering. But after the tsunami the U.N. was reduced to inventing a humanitarian disaster to distract attention from the existing humanitarian disaster it wasn’t doing anything about.
LOL! Eloquently put!
November 18, 2005
Throwing Good Money After Bad
So Kofi wants money for renovations and upgrades at Turtle Bay.
November 18, 2005 — The renovation of the United Nations’ aging East Side headquarters could cost $1.9 billion — more than a third above previous estimates, U.N. officials said yesterday.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan blamed skyrocketing Manhattan real estate and construction costs, expensive security and the balky state Legislature for pricey revisions in previous plans.He said it was “critical” for the General Assembly to approve a new scheme for the 53-year-old building, which he said had serious fire code, environmental and hazardous materials problems.
There is one member nation the U.N. has done nothing for and everything against, it is that same country that seems somehow to foot most of the bills for that corrupt, overbureaucratized, underachieving, expensively useless quagmire, in addition to being its host…. Wait, isn’t that the United States?….
We can see where Kofi’s going with this: New York{an American city} is to blame for high costs of real estate and renovation and the New York State{an American state} legislature is to be blamed for “pricey revisions in previous plans,” and oh, let’s not forget the high costs of security{provided by Americans}.
What do you bet that in view of all this, it will, in Kofi’s estimate, be the job of the American taxpayer, since the high costs are “America’s fault,” to finance the majority of renovation costs so that various and sundry tinpot dictatorships, socialist governments and Islamofascist states can condemn all that America stands for, on American soil, in increased comfort and “safer” conditions?
Well,
The United States would likely end up paying for a large share of the increase. U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said yesterday his staff was studying the newly released figures.
John, how ’bout letting France pick up the tab for a change?
October 29, 2005
Turtle Bay Blues
Paul Volcker certainly exposed a quagmire of malfeasance, corruption and what’s apparently come to be accepted as “business as usual” at the U.N.
October 29, 2005 — Paul Volcker’s final report on his investigation of the United Nations’ $64 billion Iraqi Oil-for-Food program is a stunning indictment of, well, the entire United Nations.
Yes, Saddam Hussein himself pocketed $1.8 billion through kickbacks alone from a program that was meant to feed his nation’s starving people — endangered by the economic sanctions he himself had provoked by his violations of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire accords.Yes, fully half of the 4,500 companies involved in the program — many of them recognizable corporate names — kicked back funds to Saddam’s regime in order to land lucrative oil contracts.
And, yes, political figures from around the world — especially from Russia and France — landed contracts in direct proportion to their willingness to oppose continued sanctions against Iraq.
George Galloway, the malignant British parliament member who was Saddam’s virtual mouthpiece in the run-up to the war, appears to have pocketed $270,000, funneled through his (now estranged) Palestinian wife.
Fr. Jean-Marie Benjamin, a former top aide to the Vatican’s secretary of state who had formed an anti-sanctions group, and France’s former U.N. ambassador, Jean-Bertrand Merrimee, both got six-figure deals.
Some were simply profiteers — like Marc Rich, the fugitive financier who was spared a U.S. prison term for tax evasion thanks to a last-minute presidential pardon from Bill Clinton.
Read on…
One wonders, however, why the former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve spared Kofi Annan.
As for Annan himself, we don’t really know the full extent of his culpability, beyond his son Kojo’s widely reported involvement in oil contracts.
Volcker, you see, has admitted taking care that his investigation not result in Annan’s being toppled from his post.
“I felt uncomfortably,” he said, of the point where he realized Annan might lose his job.
Really?
Well, we feel uncomfortably that Annan still has his job.
October 24, 2005
Kofi, the U.N. And Israel
At Jewish World Review, Johnathan Tobin weighs in on Kofi Annan’s recent benevolent change of attitude toward Israel and the issues that render it a mere attempt to mask his and the embattled U.N.’s true feelings toward the Jewish State. The column in its entirety is here.
…The United Nations seemed to be sliding back toward old-style anti-Semitism as the organization reached its zenith at its International Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. But Secretary General Kofi Annan has been spreading good will toward the Jews right and left these days. In the last year, the United Nations officially condemned anti-Semitism (amazing!) and commemorated the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
But before we prepare to sing the praises of Annan and the rest of the inmates of that peculiar birdcage that sits on the shores of Manhattan’s East River, a little perspective is needed. Along with appreciation for the gestures, we need to ask why this is happening, and just how far this new passion for fairness extends.
The answer to the first question is more than obvious. Annan and the United Nations are in deep trouble. The fallout from the oil-for-food scandal has just begun. Billions intended to aid the Iraqi poor during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s regime instead fell into the hands of Saddam and his foreign partners in crime while Annan did nothing. Even worse, his son Kojo played a role in this grand larceny. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for an institution in which corruption, inefficiency and hypocrisy are merely business as usual.
The call for reform was so widespread that, in a comic turn, Annan took it up himself this year. His strategy for halting the momentum of the United Nation’s critics was smart: Throw the Jews a few bones and hope that the barking of the activists will settle down.
But beyond the atmospherics that are so dearly appreciated by those lonely Israeli diplomats, what is really changing at the United Nations? The answer to that question is far from settled.
That’s because no matter how many tea parties Israeli envoys are invited to, U.N. anti-Zionism is grounded in more than just the hard hearts of so many of the delegates and permanent employees there.
It’s at the United Nations and its agency offices around the globe where hatred of Israel is not merely an opinion.
There, it is institutionalized in committees and agencies that exist to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state and to provide forums for those who wish to attack it.
INFRASTRUCTURE OF HATE
Chief among these institutions is the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, created in 1949 ostensibly to aid Palestinian refugees. All other refugees around the world since then have depended on the U.N. High Commission for Refugees for help. Only the Palestinians have their own U.N. agency. But unlike every other refugee problem, the Palestinians were not resettled but rather kept in place (through the good offices of their own U.N. agency) so as to better facilitate the ongoing war to destroy Israel.
Over the years, UNRWA morphed from being a group merely dedicated to aiding the siege of Israel to one whose employees in places like Gaza were themselves affiliated with terrorist groups, such as Hamas.
But the problem doesn’t begin and end there. The U.N. committee on the “Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” and its division of Palestinian Affairs and “Special Information Program” on the “Question of Palestine” have been there to fuel hate at every possible U.N. forum.
These organs of anti-Israel propaganda have served to fuel the conflict. And the corruption and waste at these agencies make the oil-for-food skullduggery of the past decade seem like just more of the same.
Yeah, Kofi’s scrambling to play the “hail fellow well met” to shore up the damage done over the Oil For Food scandal and the accusations from various quarters of the U.N.’s corruption, antisemitism and inefficiency, but as the author says,
The signals we should send to Congress and the White House are those of increased monetary pressure on the United Nations. Indeed, far from turning down the heat, a congressional focus on cutting funds to terrorist hangouts like UNRWA should be at the top of our agenda.
August 10, 2005
Volcker’s Info-Quest Bearing Fruit
It looks like Paul Volcker’s investigation into the U.N.’s Oil For Food quagmire is showing results, even to the arrest of one of the principal players. This WSJ editorial could not be more aptly titled than Oil For Fraud.
Oil for Fraud
Paul Volcker’s latest report details the graft over which Kofi Annan presided.
Tuesday, August 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Imagine an American administration in which the Attorney General secretly derives nearly half his income from the Gambino crime family. Imagine, too, that this hypothetical AG is a longstanding confidant of the President. That is what Paul Volcker’s investigation of the Oil for Food Program has now demonstrated was roughly the case with Kofi Annan’s United Nations.
We are referring to the publication yesterday of Mr. Volcker’s latest report on Oil for Food, which focuses chiefly on the activities of Benon Sevan, formerly executive director of the U.N.’s Office of Iraq Program, and Alexander Yakovlev, a U.N. procurement officer. Although the report contains few surprises, it shows in meticulous detail how Messrs. Sevan and Yakovlev benefitted to the tune of $150,000 and $950,000 respectively from various U.N. procurement-related schemes. In doing so, it provides a vivid picture of how Mr. Annan’s U.N. “works.”
Indeed. It’s pretty cool the way this report arrived just in time for Bolton’s arrival at the U.N., and the continuing disclosures on the graft that’s been going on under Kofi Annan’s auspices should give Bolton all the room he needs to point to reasons for cleaning up the U.N. The last thing Kofi can say is, “You don’t fix what ain’t broke.”
It’ll be pretty interesting to see what comes out at Yakovlev’s trial and, if Annan does revoke Benon Sevan’s diplomatic status(sorry, no more diplomatic immunity for you, Frenchy!) we get to extradite him, what happens there, too. From what we know of French honor, Benan would roll over on his “longtime friend” Kofi in a heartbeat, if there’s something to roll over about, in order to save his own skin.
Even now, the U.N.’s defenders like to paint Oil for Food as a great humanitarian effort slightly tarnished by a few overhyped instances of corruption. In fact, Oil for Food was a huge field of graft, helped by the fact that the man in charge of policing it was, based on the evidence Mr. Volcker has collected, in the service of the bad guys. Mr. Annan might think of this as yet another opportunity for “reform.” If he’s even remotely serious on that score, he can begin by reflecting a little harder on his own responsibility for the failures over which he, and nobody else, presided.
I’m looking forward to finding out what Volcker has to report in September.
August 6, 2005
Ollie North On The U.N.
In his {this week’s} column published at Human Events Online, Oliver North Provides some good
Advice for Ambassador Bolton
by Oliver North
Posted Aug 5, 2005
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Congratulations, John, on your new assignment as the United States’ permanent representative to the United Nations. Please know that these good wishes are offered in the same spirit that I would applaud Hercules on his willingness to cleanse the Augean stables.
He, of course, had to divert the waters of the Peneius and Alpheus to accomplish his task. To flush the effluence from the corridors of the U.N., you may have to do the same with the Hudson and East Rivers. Please permit me to assist you in that task by throwing in my two cents — which is, by the way, more than I think we ought to waste at the United Nations next year.
First, look under every rock. The corruption at the U.N. didn’t begin with the Oil for Food scandal and it certainly doesn’t end there. The United Nations is nothing more than bureaucracy piled atop waste, wrapped in fraud, covered with abuse — all of it funded by American taxpayers who foot 22 percent of U.N. dues — more than any other nation. We also pour billions of dollars more into the coffers of its related agencies.
He’s got that right. In the course of the column, North pretty much covers all the bases. Let ‘em know that America’s largesse can just as easily become considerably-smaller-esse. Go get ‘em, John!
Remind your new “colleagues” that last month the U.S. House of Representatives voted 221 to 184 to withhold 50 percent of U.S. dues to the U.N. until reforms are implemented.
