GlennReynolds.com

• April 29, 2004 | 8:30 PM ET

IGNORING SCANDAL AT THE U.N.

I wrote last week about UNScam, as the United Nations' oil-for-food scandal is being called by some. Since then, a lot more information has come out, and things look even worse than they did a week ago.

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq from selling oil because of Saddam's refusal to disarm as he promised to after the Gulf War in 1991. The oil-for-food program was supposed to let Iraq sell some oil, with the money placed under close U.N. supervision so as to ensure that it went for food and medicine for ordinary Iraqis, not weapons and palaces for Saddam. Instead, the opposite seems to have happened.

How did Saddam do it? Bribery, apparently: the oil was laundered through middlemen, and lots of money seems to have found its way into the pockets of a lot of people. Some of them seem to have been the U.N. bureaucrats overseeing the program; others are even less savory, as Claudia Rosett notes:

And though much debate has focused on the list published this past January in the Iraqi newspaper Al Mada--cataloguing some 270 individuals and entities world-wide alleged to have received illicit oil vouchers worth millions from Saddam--the Al Mada list may be the least of it (apart from the last name of the executive director of the Oil-for-Food program himself, Benon Sevan). Dwarfing the Al Mada list for size, scope and menace was the U.N.-piloted mothership, the entire $111 billion U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Supplied by Iraq's oil wells, the sums involved in Oil-for-Food's transactions were so enormous that even the routine rounding errors of a few hundred million here or there easily rivaled, for example, the $300 million or so in family money believed to have given Osama bin Laden his terrorist start. . . .
In Oil-for-Food, "Every contract tells a story," says John Fawcett, a financial investigator with the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, which has sued the financial sponsors of Sept. 11 on behalf of the victims and their families. In an interview, Mr. Fawcett and his colleague, Christine Negroni, run down the lists of Oil-for-Food authorized oil buyers and relief suppliers, pointing out likely terrorist connections. One authorized oil buyer, they note, was a remnant of the defunct global criminal bank, BCCI. Another was close to the Taliban while Osama bin Laden was on the rise in Afghanistan; a third was linked to a bank in the Bahamas involved in al Qaeda's financial network; a fourth had a close connection to one of Saddam's would-be nuclear-bomb makers.

Oil-for-food appears to have morphed into oil-for-terror. The U.N. is investigating itself, but there's reason to doubt that it will work. As Australian journalist James Morrow writes:

Far worse was the abuse of oil given to "non-end users" (that is, not sold to refineries and petroleum companies). Documents found in Iraq's old ministry of oil reveal that hundreds of prominent individuals received vouchers to buy Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices and sell it on the open market -- at tremendous, often seven-figure, profits.
Those named include not just Sevan but a vast array of Russian politicians, close friends of French President Jacques Chirac (including France's former minister of the interior), British Labour MP George Galloway, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and, closer to home, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
In short, it's a who's who list of high-profile anti-war and anti-sanctions voices, all revealed to be shills for Saddam.

Morrow wonders why it isn't getting more attention from the media:

Amazingly, though, it has taken an incredible amount of time for this story to get what little traction it has so far gained in the media. (Certainly the anti-war Left, which is happy to believe that George W. Bush toppled Saddam to kick a few contracts to Dick Cheney's old pals at Halliburton, has been deafeningly silent on the topic.)
Perhaps because of all the DIY international lawyering engaged in by the world press corps in the run-up to Iraq's invasion, many journalists are reluctant to admit that the UN they put so much faith in was many times more corrupt than they could imagine the Bush White House being.

Is that an exaggeration? It's hard to say -- and one reason it's hard to say is that the records involved have "mysteriously vanished:"

WASHINGTON - The vast majority of the United Nations' oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.
The General Accounting Office report, presented at a congressional hearing into the scandal-plagued program, determined that 80 percent of U.N. records had not been turned over.
The world body claims it transferred all information it had - including 3,059 contracts worth about $6.2 billion for delivery of food and other civilian goods to the post-Saddam governing body, the Coalition Provisional Authority.

They're calling it the "biggest financial scandal in history," but it's getting a lot less attention than Enron, or even Martha Stewart, both of which led the news for weeks -- even though it seems quite likely that many Iraqis, especially children, died because they weren't getting the food and medicine that this program was supposed to provide.

You'd think that more people would care about this story, wouldn't you? I wonder why they don't seem to.

• April 26, 2004 | 11:57 AM ET

ONLY HUMAN, BUT STILL. . . .

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post looks at some journalistic errors and observes:

Reporters at President Bush's prime time news conference two weeks ago were relentless in pressing him to admit "any errors in judgment," or his "biggest mistake," or that he owes the American people an "apology."
But when news organizations screw up, their executives often fail to admit culpability or tell readers and viewers they're sorry. In many cases, they merely issue canned statements and slink into the shadows without answering questions from the sort of nosy reporters they employ to harass everyone else.
And as the implosions at USA Today and the New York Times make clear, newsrooms are sometimes more dysfunctional and paralyzed than the government agencies they cover, with top editors uninformed about problems with subordinates, missing obvious warning signals or intimidating their staff against bringing them bad news.

Instead of apologizing, I'd rather they did a better job. But this phenomenon is a familiar one: the same people who ruthlessly criticize, well, everybody else, are awfully thin-skinned when people point out that they've dropped the ball.

We often hear from journalists that they're the "fourth estate," operating as a check on the government in the name of the people. But we didn't elect them. And they don't fulfill that function very well. It's not a matter of asking the "tough questions." As the press conference example above indicates, there's more posturing and gotcha-ing going on than tough questioning. (As I mentioned here earlier, there were plenty of tougher questions that could have been asked, if developing actual information had been the goal.)

Jay Reding notes, "What we're seeing now is a struggle between what the media thinks it is and what it has actually become." And what it has become isn't pretty. This has led President Bush to challenge the press's claim to represent the public, with consequences explored here by Jay Rosen, chair of the NYU journalism program.

I like to point out media bias. And bias is a real issue. But the bigger issue, to paraphrase Michael Dukakis, isn't ideology. It's competence.

• April 25, 2004 | 10:33 PM ET

GETTING IT WRONG

Everybody makes mistakes. It's part of being human. That said, it's been an especially, er, human week for the news media.

The first one was a doozy: Multiple resignations at USA Today over its own Jayson Blair-style scandal.

But in a way, the smaller screwups are more troubling than the big scandals, because they're more common, and because nobody loses their job. Here's one example: NASA was forced last week to issue a press release pointing out that some news photos of Iraq war dead were actually old pictures of the Columbia space shuttle crew's coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base:

NOTE TO EDITORS : n04-059

Columbia Crew Mistakenly Identified As Iraqi War Casualties

Many news organizations across the country are mistakenly identifying the flag-draped caskets of the Space Shuttle Columbia's crew as those of war casualties from Iraq.

Editors are being asked to confirm that the images used in news reports are in fact those of American casualties and not those of the NASA astronauts who were killed Feb.1, 2003, in the Columbia tragedy.

An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia's seven astronauts.

News organizations across the world have been publishing and distributing images featured on the web site.

A partial list of those who were snookered is available here, and it includes some pretty big-name outlets.

Then there was this howler:

Thursday's New York Times misidentified GOP Senate candidate Pete Coors as a Ku Klux Klan member who murdered a black sharecropper. . . .
The Times story concerned a federal court decision upholding Louisiana resident Ernest Avants' 2003 conviction in the slaying.
The story indicated the accompanying photo was of Avants. But the picture actually was of Coors on the day the Golden beer baron announced he was running in Colorado's open Senate race.

Sounds like somebody needs to pay closer attention to the photos. Meanwhile blogger Tom Maguire notes that media outlets keep getting the dates of John Kerry's military service wrong, ignoring his time as an active reserve officer after he returned from Vietnam. Maguire asks:

Does it change the story to say that Mr. Kerry, while still in the Naval Reserve, ran in an anti-war caucus?
Does it change the story to say that Mr. Kerry, the 26 year old Navy Lieutenant, had arranged a private meeting with North Vietnamese and Vietcong emissaries to the peace talks?
Maybe not much. But one might hope that both the Kerry campaign and the "All the News" folks would be able to report accurately the basic facts of Kerry's military service.

Yes. One often hears members of Big Media speak disrespectfully of people who write on the Internet, and proclaim their own superiority based on their employment of editors and fact-checkers. But it seems as if they've got a long way to go before they're entitled to put on airs.