November 30, 2004
The UN has proposed sweeping changes to its structure and its regulations based on the long-anticipated report from Secretary General Kofi Annan's blue-ribbon team. Those changes include enlarging the Security Council and reforming the Human Rights Commission, but also requires nations to get UN approval before taking pre-emptive action to protect themselves: The United Nations on Tuesday proposed the most sweeping changes in its history, recommending the overhaul of its top decision-making group, the Security Council, and holding out the possibility that it could grant legitimacy to pre-emptive military strikes. In this case, however, "granting" legitimacy involves arrogating unto itself all authority to grant permission for action in the first place: But it acknowledged that a new problem had risen because of the nature of terrorist attacks "where the threat is not imminent but still claimed to be real: for example, the acquisition, with allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear weapons-making...
December 2, 2004
Earlier this week, when the New York Times provided analysis of the report from a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Kofi Annan to recommend changes to the United Nations, I expressed a great deal of skepticism about the result. Others, including Glenn Reynolds, noted that the report appeared to legitimize pre-emptive military action, in Glenn's case based on a quick analysis by the University of Pittsburgh law school. However, in reading the actual report, it's clear that the UN intends on stripping nations of their sovereign right to defend themselves by requiring Security Council approval for any pre-emptive military action. A read through paragraphs 188 - 198 demonstrates that the panel basically took John Kerry's global test and plugged it into their report: 189. Can a State, without going to the Security Council, claim in these circumstances the right to act, in anticipatory self-defence, not just pre-emptively (against an imminent or...
December 5, 2004
With all of the troubles facing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at Turtle Bay -- graft, corruption, multiple investigations into his operations, his son's involvement in at least a major conlfict of interest, and calls for his resignation -- we may have an opening at the top of the UN soon, either through removal or Annan's resignation. Republicans have led the charge to insist on accountability from UN leadership for the disastrous results of their management of the Oil-For-Food program, and Senator Norm Coleman's call for Annan to step down is completely appropriate. However, it does leave the question as to whom the GOP would consider an appropriate replacement for Annan, and we cannot just advocate abdication without having a constructive candidate in mind. Best of all would be Professor Reynolds' suggestion of Vaclav Havel, a man of surpassing integrity and clarity of thought. Unfortunately, he has such clarity of thought...
December 6, 2004
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, commenting on the proposed structural changes to the UN currently under review, asserted that the rules change on pre-emptive military action would have resulted in an approval of the Iraq invasion had they existed prior to 2003: New rules being proposed for a reformed United Nations might have allowed the United States and Britain to carry out their invasion of Iraq with the approval of the world body, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said. "Had this new jurisprudence been there, I think the Security Council would probably -- you can't be certain -- have decided to take Chapter 7 action against Iraq in respect of human rights abuses," Straw told the daily The Independent. "That would have been as much a basis for determining an ultimatum by the Council as weapons of mass destruction became. They are dealing with situations before a latent threat becomes imminent....
December 7, 2004
Kofi Annan has answered calls for his resignation by refusing to leave before the end of his current term, an unsurprising development after Tony Blair suddenly endorsed Annan's continued leadership: Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday rejected calls from several U.S. lawmakers for his resignation, saying he will "carry on" at the helm of the United Nations for the next two years. Five Republicans in the House of Representative on Monday backed a call last week by a GOP senator for Annan to resign amid allegations of corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program. But outside the United States, there is no clamor for the secretary-general's resignation, and he has picked up support from many of the 191 U.N. member states. Well, now there's a shock: the majority of the world's kleptocracies support the man who presided over the largest swindle in world history. Even with his son hip-deep in the scandal,...
December 16, 2004
The United Nations has received a report from its own investigators detailing years of sexual abuse, extortion, and bribery in its own peacekeeping operation in Congo. Just as in other major operations conducted by the UN over the past decade, corruption and a lack of accountability has allowed the victims of genocidal dictatorships to be victimized again and repeatedly by the very organization that purports to champion them: The 34-page report, which was obtained by The Washington Post, accuses U.N. peacekeepers from Morocco, Pakistan and Nepal of seeking to obstruct U.N. efforts to investigate a sexual abuse scandal that has damaged the United Nations' standing in Congo. The report documents 68 cases of alleged rape, prostitution and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers from Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa and Nepal. U.N. officials say they have uncovered more than 150 allegations of sexual misconduct throughout the country as part of a...
December 22, 2004
Kofi Annan issued a coded call for America to drop its investigations into the United Nations and leave him alone, as he cheered the end of an admittedly horrible year for the Secretary-General and the United Nations: At a year-end news conference Tuesday, Annan said he had no intentions of stepping down over allegations of corruption in the Iraqi oil-for-food program, which have "cast a shadow" over the United Nations and especially over its relations with Washington. "The United States needs the United Nations and the United Nations needs the United States," the secretary-general said. "And we need to find a way of working together." "The current criticisms and the attacks have not been helpful for the relationship, regardless of which quarter it comes from, and we need to find a way of putting those kinds of acrimonious discussions behind us and move on," he added. Annan once again shows...
December 23, 2004
The London Times reports that surreptitiously filmed sex videos may create an Abu Ghraib-like scandal for the UN in Congo. A UN field "expert" shot the videos using hidden cameras while he had sex with Congolese women and children supposedly under the protection of the UN and sold the videos on the black market: HOME-MADE pornographic videos shot by a United Nations logistics expert in the Democratic Republic of Congo have sparked a sex scandal that threatens to become the UN’s Abu Ghraib. The expert was a Frenchman who worked at Goma airport as part of the UN’s $700 million-a-year effort to rebuild the war-shattered country. When police raided his home they discovered that he had turned his bedroom into a studio for videotaping and photographing sex sessions with young girls. The bed was surrounded by large mirrors on three sides, according to a senior Congolese police officer. On the...
January 2, 2005
The New York Times reports on what can only be called an intervention for Kofi Annan in a Manhattan apartment that recently took place. Former US diplomat Richard Holbrooke hosted a conference that told an impassive Annan that he needed to clean up his act and that of his staff in order to quit poking the American bear: At the gathering, Secretary General Kofi Annan listened quietly to three and a half hours of bluntly worded counsel from a group united in its personal regard for him and support for the United Nations. The group's concern was that lapses in his leadership during the past two years had eclipsed the accomplishments of his first four-year term in office and were threatening to undermine the two years remaining in his final term. They began by arguing that Mr. Annan had to refresh his top management team, and on Monday he will...
January 6, 2005
Colin Powell announced today that the tsunami relief "core group" of India, Japan, Australia, and the US would disband and fold itself into the UN effort -- now that the world body finally met to organize its relief efforts: "The core group helped to catalyze the international response," Powell told a tsunami relief conference in Jakarta according to a prepared text released by the State Department. "Having served its purpose, it will ... now fold itself into the broader coordination efforts of the United Nations." The analysis by Reuters' Arshad Mohammed credits formation of the group to criticism that George Bush and the US were slow to respond. However, the four nations formed the core group and began distributing aid before the UN even called its meeting to discuss it -- which, coincidentally, occurred today. The UN proved itself to be little more than a lumbering roadblock. Had we waited...
January 23, 2005
I wish the United Nations would make up its mind. In the aftermath of the tsunami and its resultant devastation, UN undersecretary for disaster relief Jan Egeland called Western nations "stingy" in their assistance to poorer nations. Today, however, the UN released a report which blames the corruption endemic in their assistance programs on the money given them by the same group of wealthy nations: The ravages of modern warfare are too often compounded by ill-conceived and expensive post-war reconstruction projects that fuel a "feeding frenzy" of corruption and profiteering, according to a U.N.-funded report. The report, citing graft from Liberia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Lebanon and Afghanistan, said the overwhelming international response after wars was simply to pump large amounts of money into rebuilding programs without proper control. "What is difficult enough to try to manage in times of peace becomes even more problematic in post-war situations where the sheer...
January 28, 2005
In yet another example of moral obtuseness, the UN's "special rapporteur" of human rights in Southwest Asia has accused Israel of war crimes, apartheid, and insists that Israel will remain an occupying power in Gaza even after Israel pulls out: International law will continue to view Israel as an occupying force in Gaza, even after its planned withdrawal, says a United Nations human-rights envoy. John Dugard said Israel would remain responsible for Palestinian civilians in the territory, as it planned to retain control of Gaza's borders. Dugard, a South African law professor, claims that Israel wants to retain its "grip" on Gaza even after the pullout, although the BBC doesn't explain how a retreat equates to an occupation. As far as the moronic notion that guarding an international border equates to occupying one's neighbor, the entire world would exist in a state of mutual occupation if Dougard's advice carried the...
February 1, 2005
Here's a report that will likely have everyone buzzing shortly: Secretary-General Kofi Annan has selected former U.S. President Bill Clinton to be the U.N. point man for tsunami relief and reconstruction, a well-informed U.N. diplomat said Tuesday. U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard refused to confirm the appointment but said "a statement will be released on the subject by my office in the next few hours." Why do I hear the theme from "Jaws" in my mind, all of a sudden? How fortunate for Hillary Clinton that her husband will have such a high-profile position over the next couple of years. It will give her endless opportunities to be seen in his shadow, smiling and nodding but unable to get a word in edgewise against the Great Oxygen Remover. On the other hand, pushing him to the opposite side of the globe may give Hillary the opportunity to work alone for a...
February 19, 2005
The Bush Administration has broken with past conservative precedent and offered support for the controversial Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), a United Nations convention that has hung around for almost a quarter-century after Ronald Reagan scotched it. The American Conservative Union yesterday threatened to make LOST a "litmus test" for conservatives in the 2006 elections if the Senate GOP leadership insisted on ratifying it: Leaders of the conservative movement yesterday openly broke with the Bush administration over the Law of the Sea Treaty, which they say sacrifices U.S. sovereignty. They warned Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, and other members of his party in Congress that their continued backing of the treaty could cost them the support of conservative voters. "The conservative movement is opposed to the Law of the Sea Treaty and to the administration's support of the treaty," American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene said...
February 22, 2005
Former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci reminds us at the New York Times why we eschewed United Nations leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq. Carlucci warns that Kosovo, a UN protectorate for six years now and no closer to a final resolution on its status than when the West first intervened, may soon explode into violence again: The world reacted in horror six years ago when the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic embarked on an ethnic cleansing operation against Kosovo's Albanians, forcing 700,000 people, nearly half the population, to flee the province. Reports of massacres and images of mileslong lines of refugees fleeing into neighboring Albania and Macedonia compelled the world to act. The NATO air campaign against Serbia that followed convinced Belgrade to give up its brutal assault, and Kosovo was put under United Nations administration. And so it remains to this day: an international protectorate, legally part of Serbia, but...
February 24, 2005
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a remarkably stern and uncompromising message to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad tonight, joining the White House in calling for a complete withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon. Dismissing Syrian murmurings of returning to the long-dead, phased-withdrawal Taif Accord, Annan demanded that Syria completely retreat by April: Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, added his voice yesterday to American calls for Syria to pull out of Lebanon. He warned the Syrians in an Arabic television interview that they would face "measures" - presumably some form of sanctions - if they did not pull their army out of Lebanon completely by April. With pressure growing every day, Waleed al-Mualem, the Syrian deputy foreign minister, committed his country to further withdrawals, but failed to make a clear commitment to complete evacuation. The new demand by Annan, who almost never operates independent of a consensus, comes...
February 25, 2005
In a report that likely will garner little attention after the Islamist attacks today in Iraq, the BBC has a flash report that several UN peacekeepers died in an ambush in the Ituri region of Congo. The report just came through and is light on details: Several UN peacekeepers have been killed during an armed ambush in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the country's UN mission. The attack happened on Friday morning in the north-eastern Ituri region, where 4,800 peacekeepers are deployed. A UN spokesman said there were no further details yet on the exact number or nationality of the men killed. He said they were ambushed by "unidentified armed elements" while they were on patrol. Ituri sits at the northeast tip of Congo, just south of Sudan and the Darfur region where Islamists have conducted a massive genocide campaign, one which the UN still refuses to officially...
March 2, 2005
Last Friday I noted that nine UN peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in the Congo by rogue militia elements. After more than ten years of running from fights, I wrote that the UN would have to start fighting back if it wanted to retain any credibility. Apparently, someone at the UN has reached the same conclusion: United Nations peacekeepers have gone on the offensive against a militia group in Congo, deploying helicopters and killing nearly 60 people in the biggest battle fought by the world body in more than a decade. But criticism of the operation was mounting yesterday when it emerged that up to a third of the dead could have been civilians used as human shields by the group that was the attackers' intended target. The latest hostilities began when a battalion of Pakistani soldiers advanced on the militia base in the Ituri district, the scene of...
March 13, 2005
The Washington Post reports that United Nations peacekeepers now face numerous and substantial allegations of sexual abuse in several of their peacekeeping efforts, belying the notion that the Congo provided just a fluke or an exception to the lax oversight and inherent lack of central discipline for UN troops. These allegations include forced prostitution, sexual extortion for food and water, and exploiting pre-teen girls for sex. Turtle Bay now wants internal reviews of all seventeen peacekeeping missions around the world to determine how bad it gets: The United Nations is facing new allegations of sexual misconduct by U.N. personnel in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and elsewhere, which is complicating the organization's efforts to contain a sexual abuse scandal that has tarnished its Nobel Prize-winning peacekeepers in Congo. The allegations indicate that a series of measures the United Nations has taken in recent years have failed to eliminate a culture of sexual...
March 18, 2005
The Washington Times reports today that the United Nations has declared itself "not in the mood" for more change, despite the revelations of multiple sex scandals in some or all of their peacekeeping efforts and the Oil-for-Food corruption that put billions in the pocket of a genocidal tyrant: The senior aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he does not expect additional firings of key personnel as the organization struggles to defend itself from multiple scandals. "We're not in the mood for more wholesale change," said Mark Malloch Brown, who became Mr. Annan's chief of staff and primary adviser three months ago. "Senior appointments will not stop, but there is no wholesale change," he told The Washington Times in an interview earlier this week. One wonders exactly what it takes to put Kofi Annan in the mood for change. The disappearance of over $10 billion (the Senate estimates $21 billion)...
March 19, 2005
The United Nations will recast its priorities to make the security of Western nations a key goal in its mission, according to the London Telegraph: The security of America and other wealthy countries will for the first time be declared a key priority for the United Nations under reforms designed to restore confidence in the crisis-ridden international body. The reforms, to be announced tomorrow by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, will be seen as a concession to Washington after repeated clashes with President George W Bush over US foreign policy, including the war in Iraq. The UN Secretariat promises a "real re-launch … a fundamental manifesto" after criticism of its performance since the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. This move surprises me only because I wouldn't have given Kofi Annan enough credit for coming to this conclusion. Prior to 9/11, the UN managed to only make...
March 21, 2005
Today's Washington Post reviews the Congolese sex scandal that demonstrates the utter collapse of UN credibility and command/management functions at Turtle Bay. Pre-teens have been trandsformed into cheap hookers by blue-helmeted rapists, who then use them for sex with dollar-per-encounter transactions -- if the girl is lucky: She's known in the community as a "one-dollar U.N. girl." At night, she sleeps on the cracked pavement outside a storefront. In the mornings, she sashays through the dusty streets, clutching a frayed parasol against the blinding sun. Yvette and her friends are also called kidogo usharatis, Swahili for small prostitutes. They loiter outside the camps of U.N. peacekeepers, hoping to sell their bodies for a mug of milk, a cold soda or -- best of all -- a single dollar. "I'm sad about it. But I needed the dollars. I can't go farm because of the militias. Who will feed me?" asked...
March 24, 2005
The UN has released its recommendations for combatting sexual abuse by its peacekeeping troops, but it transfers responsibility from its own ranks to that of the nations which provide the troops. Normally, I would applaud that concept; I don't want to give the UN power to discipline US troops. However, the problem with the UN's troop composition is the countries from which they come. That is compounded by a mind-boggling attitude of "boys will be boys" that completely ignores the nature of the exploitation of women and young girls in the Congo and elsewhere: A U.N. report on peacekeeper sex abuse released Tuesday describes the U.N. military arm as deeply flawed and recommends withholding salaries of the guilty and requiring nations to pursue legal action against perpetrators. Those recommendations and several others come after repeated allegations that peacekeepers exploited the very people they were sent to protect. The report described...
March 27, 2005
The London Times informs us today that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has struggled with depression and might quit his United Nations post over the continuing and deepening scandals surrounding his leadership of the world debating society. The report seems like an attempt to paint a sympathetic portrait of a man torn by circumstances between his career and his family rather than the natural progression of the revelation of Annan's incompetence and corruption: KOFI ANNAN, the United Nations secretary-general, is said to be struggling with depression and considering his future. Colleagues have reported concerns about Annan ahead of an official report this week that will examine his son Kojo’s connection to the controversial Iraqi oil for food scheme. Depending on the findings of the report, by a team led by the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Annan may have to choose between the secretary-generalship and loyalty to his son....
March 29, 2005
Just when we thought that the United Nations had enough problems trying to keep its peacekeepers and mission management off of prepubescent girls in Africa and its hands off of aid money intended for the starving and oppressed, we find out that Turtle Bay wants to take on a whole new mission. Now the UN, which brought you the Oil-For-Food scandal and the rape of the Congo, wants to take over the Internet: The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications. But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialized organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN; the Internet Engineering Task Force; the World Wide Web Consortium; and regional address registries. The ITU, a United Nations...
March 31, 2005
CQ reader Marc Landers thinks he's discovered why the United Nations can't keep track of the money it gets, allowing so much of it to wind up in the pockets of its own managers, such as Benon Sevan, and tyrants like Saddam Hussein. It may not happen through maliciousness -- it might be that they just don't know how to do simple math. For instance, a new report from the UN on the children of Iraq claims that the starvation rate has doubled since the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the BBC reports this morning: Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says. Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led invasion - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says. ... When Saddam Hussein...
April 1, 2005
Today's editorial in the Washington Post accomplishes the remarkable feat of both understanding that the Volcker Report doesn't exonerate UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at all, and then using that fact to endorse Annan's continued leadership of the UN. Confused? So, apparently, is the Post's editorial board: While the investigators found that Kojo Annan misled the secretary general about the length of his employment, and while it seems all too clear that he intended to profit from his U.N. connections, the probe did not find any evidence that Cotecna won its U.N. contract thanks to Kofi Annan's intervention. Nevertheless, the report does not, as Mr. Annan claimed this week, amount to an "exoneration." For while Mr. Annan was not found guilty of direct corruption, the portrait of the secretary general's office, as it emerges from the report, is not attractive. Mr. Annan's former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, is found to...
April 5, 2005
The United Nations may face yet another scandal, the BBC reports tonight, regarding its conduct in the UN mission to the Congo. A UN whistleblower claims that a key report included falsified allegations of a Rwandan invasion of Congo: The United Nations says it is looking into allegations that a UN document contained false information that caused instability in war-torn central Africa. A former UN employee, the American intelligence analyst William Church, told the BBC the details were added to a public UN report by other UN staff. The report stated Rwanda mounted a military incursion against neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo last year. ... [A] dissenting member of the UN panel, William Church, has now told the BBC that the Rwandan invasion was a false claim added by other panel members who had come under pressure from un-named sources. The chair of the UN investigation, the Algerian diplomat Abdulahi...
April 13, 2005
Kofi Annan takes to the opinion pages of the New York Times today to preach accountability to Americans, a stunning and laughable assertion from the man who has led the United Nations to its nadir of credibility at least partially based on his own lack of accountability: In Oslo this week, donor countries pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Sudan, but while I applaud the donors' generosity, promises alone are not enough. Time is running out for the people of Sudan. We need pledges immediately converted into cash and more protection forces in Darfur to prevent yet more death and suffering. If we fail in Sudan, the consequences of our actions will haunt us for years to come. After more than two million dead, four million uprooted, and 21 years of warfare, southern Sudan is at last on the threshold of peace. It is, of course, a volatile, fragile peace....
April 25, 2005
No one expected that John Bolton would get an easy hearing for his confirmation for UN ambassador, especially given the get-tough attitude that George Bush wants to take with Kofi Annan and the entire corrupt executive at Turtle Bay. However, those challenging Bolton's confirmation have turned this into a parody of the attitudes that presumably permeate the American Left -- a cacaphony of complaints about how destructive yelling and scolding can be to one's self-esteem, played out on a stage where only the biggest egos get the microphones: In a new allegation against President Bush's nominee for United Nations ambassador, a woman who worked under John Bolton in the early 1980s has complained that he tried to fire her after they clashed over US policy on infant formula in developing nations. Lynne D. Finney, now a therapist in Utah, wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Friday, saying Bolton...
May 1, 2005
The degradation of the United Nations continues apace under the moral authority of the Kofi Annan administration. The AP reports that UN peacekeepers sexually exploited Liberian women and children in the same pattern as they did in Congo and several of the other UN assignments: UN peacekeepers sexually abused and exploited local women and girls in Liberia and more accusations are expected, a UN spokesman said Friday. ... "The allegations range from the exchange of goods, money or services for sex to the sexual exploitation of minors. The peacekeeping department here in New York as well as the mission on the ground are taking appropriate follow-up action," he said. A UN official speaking on condition of anonymity said the number of allegations could eventually total 20. The head of the mission in Liberia, Jacques Paul Klein, is to step down when his contract expires at the end of the month,...
May 11, 2005
Pity the poor United Nations. Not only is the management at Turtle Bay hopelessly corrupt and inept, its new blogosphere apologists don't appear very bright, either. Not only did they run a lame attack post about Roger L. Simon's recent focus on history's largest embezzlement scam, they sent out e-mails to bloggers asking us to promote it: 20% of Roger L. Simon's blog entries during the month of April make reference to the Oil-for-Food controversy. 0% of Roger L. Simon's blog entries during April make reference to the following UN-related issues[...] Is Simon's hyper-focus on a single UN-related issue based on deep convictions? Unbending principles? Moral outrage? Maybe. Then again, there's his explanation: "Thanks to the Secretary General of the United Nations for providing this blog with its first 50,000+ visitor day." - Roger L. Simon UND then lists a number of UN initiatives that supposedly have been or are...
May 24, 2005
In a report on the continuing opposition of George Voinovich to John Bolton for his confirmation as UN ambassador, the New York Times reports that the Democrats will remove the hold on his nomination and apparently will not start an expected filibuster: One Democrat, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, had sought to block a Senate vote on Mr. Bolton, saying she would oppose any vote until the State Department provided documents related to the nomination that the department has so far refused to hand over. On Tuesday afternoon, however, a spokeswoman for Ms. Boxer said she had decided to lift a hold on Mr. Bolton's nomination. Ms. Boxer's spokeswoman said she would join with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware in agreeing to a Republican plan to move toward a vote on Mr. Bolton after allowing up to 40 hours of debate. It appeared unlikely that any Senate Democrat...
May 29, 2005
No one doubts that the United Nations has had a terrible past few years. They wound up supine to a genocidal maniac in Iraq, whose pockets they stuffed with billions in cash through corruption and incompetence while his people starved. Their peacekeeping missions have proven worthless as the troops stand by and watch civilians get massacred. Those women and young girls who are unfortunate to wind up at refugee camps get used by the soldiers and the UN management officials as prostitutes merely for subsistence levels of food, or an occasional dollar in return for sexual favors. Kofi Annan urges action in Darfur, but can't bring himself to declare the Arab rampage there a genocide, which would force the Security Council to intervene. This corruption and incompetence has been proven to run to the highest levels of the UN, and the organization still cannot bring itself to hold its leadership...
June 10, 2005
The Guardian and the Canada Free Press reports that blueprints for nuclear centrifuges, complete with multilanguage assembly instructions, have disappeared from the United Nations' and IAEA Vienna headquarters. The blueprints could easily guide anyone through the process of building the necessary centrifuges required to refine uranium into weapons-grade material: [E]lectronic drawings that give comprehensive details of how to build and test equipment essential for making nuclear bombs have vanished from the UN and UN investigators are saying they could show up sale anytime on the international black market. The blueprints, running to hundreds of pages, show how to make centrifuges for enriching uranium. In addition, the investigators have been unable to trace key components for uranium centrifuge rigs and fear that drawings for a nuclear warhead have been secreted away and could be for sale. ... A senior official said several sets of blueprints for uranium centrifuges - the so-called...
June 16, 2005
Oh, they're gonna have a Freakers Ball, Tonight, at the Freakers Hall, And you know you're invited, one and all ... After weeks of waiting for an RSVP from the White House about its invitation to the UN's 60th anniversary bash in San Francisco, Turtle Bay got its answer yesterday. The United States will send a representative to the party -- Ambassador Sichan Siv: Organizers of a celebration here to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations had expressed concern for weeks that the Bush administration would shun the event as a snub to the world body. On Wednesday, organizers learned that big-name invitees - among them, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - would not attend. In their place, said Nancy L. Peterson, president of the United Nations Association of San Francisco, the administration indicated that it would send Ambassador Sichan Siv, the...
June 17, 2005
Henry Hyde has proposed a bill that would require thirty-nine separate reforms for the United Nations to complete by 2008, 32 of them by 2007, in order to avoid having half of its American dues withheld. It will compete against a bill by Tom Lantos that demands reform but doesn't require a cutoff of dues, leaving that question to the State Department. The two bills will come up for a vote today, sending a message to Turtle Bay of American exasperation with its corruption, graft, and lack of accountability: "Over the years, as we listened to the counsels for patience, the U.N.'s failings have grown," said House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., sponsor of the measure. "The time has finally come where we must in good conscience say 'enough.'" Hyde was joined by lawmakers with a litany of complaints against what they said was the U.N.'s lavish spending,...
June 22, 2005
Another UN scam has come to light, according to a Fox News report I missed yesterday, one in which a father-son pair may have combined to ensure access to plenty of cash through the UN's auspices. This time, the Annans are not directly involved, but a Russian involved in the UN's Procurement Department with access to over a billion dollars in funding that he directed to a firm which hired his son as a requirement for the contract: The staffer in question is Alexander Yakovlev (search), a dapper Russian who is possibly the longest tenured member of the U.N. procurement department — which last year alone spent more than $1.3 billion buying supplies and services for the United Nations. ... Yakovlev’s job includes such sensitive matters as vetting potential U.N. contractors and processing their bids. In the 1990s, Yakovlev was deeply involved in the hiring of inspection firms for Oil-for-Food,...