Worst Coverage Ever? Reporting on the UN Oil-For-Food Program

If you don’t read the conservative press, you may not have heard of the
UN oil-for-food scandal. ’Oil-for-food’ was a United Nations-administered
program that allowed Saddam Hussein to sell oil despite the sanctions against
him. The proceeds of the sales were for humanitarian relief, but Hussein
and his cronies also manipulated the system and skimmed off billions for
their own purposes.

For conservatives, the story is all about the UN. That’s because the ’scandal’
confirms the long-held belief that Turtle Bay is occupied by thoroughly corrupt
and incompetent bureaucrats. And the affair doesn’t just sully the UN; if
the sanctions program proves to have been deeply flawed, the argument to
go to war takes on <a
href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040701faessay83409/george-a-lopez-david-cortright/containing-iraq-sanctions-worked.html">greater
weight in hindsight.

But the simple and largely unreported fact is that there is no UN oil-for-food
scandal. What we know from a number of sources, including an oft-cited <a
href="Homey:\(http\--www.gao.gov-new.items-d04651t.pdf)">GAO report [PDF],
is that there was a Ba’ath Party oil-for-food swindle, in which Iraqi
officials extracted ’overcharges’ and kickbacks from big multinationals,
then laundered the loot through a number of foreign banks. And then there’s
a rumor that some UN officials were involved.

The media’s coverage of the affair has embraced <a
href="http://www.gopwing.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=175">the
conservative view. The reporting’s been awful, with factually tenuous
claims widely covered and vital context largely ignored. The ironic result
of such skewed reporting is that progressives, not wanting to pile onto
the UN, have had no taste for getting to the bottom of this immense corporate
scandal.

How bad has the reporting been? I used a Lexis-Nexis search of daily newspaper
stories published in the U.S. over
the past six months, and drew an (almost) random sample of 60 articles, which
I read from beginning to end. 

It was immediately clear that this story is the darling of the conservative
media: despite drawing from thousands of publications, 35 of the 60 articles
were from Sun Myung Moon’s Washington
Times and Rupert Murdoch’s New
York Post. Ten of the articles were written by fellows at conservative
think-tanks. Often the stories were then syndicated into the mainstream press.

The editorial slant explains why 33 of the 38 people quoted in the sample
were either Republican officials or, again, right-wing think-tankers. 17
members of Congress were quoted: 15 Republicans and 2 Democrats who agreed
with them.

One person you would expect to hear from about the largest humanitarian
relief program in the world is <a
href="http://www.commondreams.org/views/071800-102.htm">Dennis Halliday,
the former UN Undersecretary for humanitarian aid. But not one of the 60
articles I read quoted him. That might be because he went on <a
href="http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/19/i_dl.01.html">CNN and
said bluntly:

"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 [which oversaw and had veto power over
every sale]. They knew every damned contract."

French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte <a
href="http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/oilforfood/2004/0407levitte.htm">noted
in the LA Times that the full contracts were only circulated
to the United States and Britain,
which had expressly asked to review them. color:#333333'> But the Security
Council’s oversight was mentioned in only 5 of the 60 articles sampled.

Ignoring that kind of context is a disservice to readers. Yet few articles
mentioned that the UN’s alleged complicity in the scandal is based on a charge
made by Ahmad Chalabi and
his <a
href="http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iraqi_National_Congress">Iraqi
National Congress (INC). The exile group reportedly uncovered documents
in the Iraqi oil ministry that implicated a number of players. But, as Joshua
Marshall noted, Chalabi "apparently deemed [them] too important to let anyone
outside his circle see." It is unclear what the <a
href="http://www.forbes.com/energy/2004/05/20/cz_ms_0520iraq.html">status of
the documents is today.

The timing of the allegation is also suspect. The story emerged during a
powerplay between Chalabi and UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who was trying to <a
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37921-2004Apr23?language=printer">push
the returned exiles  out of the interim government and replace them with font-family:"Times New Roman";color:black'> "mainly technocrats."

38 articles in the sample devoted at least two paragraphs to background,
but just 5 of those gave the reader any sense of the story’s history and
context. And I was very generous in my evaluation, crediting for example
William Safire for writing: "Speaking power to truth, [the media covers]
dark suspicions…that the scandal was ’drummed up’ by the doves’ Iraqi villain,
Ahmad Chalabi."

Safire’s gripe aside, basic <a
href="http://www.peaceredding.org/Weapons%20of%20Mass%20Destruction%20Or%20Mass%20Distraction.htm">standards
of journalism dictate that a source as dubious as the INC be identified.
But most papers simply attributed the story’s break to an "Iraqi newspaper."

There was similarly shoddy reporting of the charge that <a
href="http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/background/latest/sevancv.html">Benon Sevan,
the director of the oil-for-food program, accepted a bribe. While 33 articles
reported the allegation, just 14 of those mentioned Sevan’s immediate and <a
href="http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2004/db021004.doc.htm">unequivocal
denial.

Almost a quarter of the stories advanced the frankly laughable proposition
that opposition to the war in Iraq,
especially by France and Russia,
was based on their fear of losing a cash cow. But using a frequently cited
estimate by The Times of London, sales under the program would represent
something like <a
href="http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html">six tenths of
one percent of Russian exports and one quarter of one percent of French exports.
Contrast that with exports to the United States—6.1
percent and 7.8 percent respectively—and the charge becomes too ludicrous
for a credible journalist to repeat.

Many stories echoed a NY Daily News editorial line: "Unquestioned
is that very little of this relief ever ended up in the bellies of Iraq’s
hungry children…." But that’s ’unquestionably’ incorrect; <a
href="http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/2b9f8721715ea82785256e8900649977?OpenDocument">the
record of oil-for-food’s humanitarian success is not in dispute:

"…the programme provided a basic food ration for all
27 million Iraqis. From 1996 to 2001, the average Iraqi’s daily food intake
increased from 1,200 to 2,200 calories per day. Malnutrition among Iraqi
children was cut by half during the life of the programme..."

According to the GAO, just over 93% percent of the oil-for-food money went
where it was supposed to go. But the fact that the program saved lives was
mentioned in only 3 of the 60 articles sampled. Not a single article mentioned
the <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/tinycoffins.html">half million children under
the age of five who died under rigid sanctions before the relief program
began.

I could continue. But the point is that this kind of slanted reporting has
consequences. Seeing a right-wing smear campaign against the UN, Congressional
Democrats have shown little appetite to investigate the oil-for-food program.
The unfortunate result is that there are two congressional investigations
led by <a
href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.asp?CID=N00000652&cycle=2002">Christopher
Shays (R-CT) and <a
href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.asp?CID=N00004702&cycle=2004">Henry
Hyde (R-IL), and Shays has already suggested that his committee will
focus primarily on the UN’s ’systemic’ problems, not on the corporations
that paid kickbacks and dubious ’surcharges’ to the Iraqi regime.

But Democrats should seek a full and complete investigation into the real oil-for-food
scandal: a scam linking greasy oil barons, multinational corporate raiders,
money-laundering bankers and one of the most brutal dictators of recent memory.

We should find out why, despite the howling from many conservatives, the
Bush administration has itself been accused of <a
href="http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/04/27/World/Iraqis.Claim.Bremer.Slowed.Their.U.n.Graft.Probe-670048.shtml">obstructing
the investigation. We should ask: <a
href="http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_4366.shtml">’what
information don’t they want to come out?’ It’s speculation,
but perhaps it has to do with the <a
href="http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/halliburton12112002/">$23.8
million dollars in contracts that Halliburton subsidiaries submitted
to the oil-for-food program in 1998 and 1999 during Vice President Cheney’s
leadership.

But we’ll never know the answers if Democrats don’t ask the hard questions.
If they don’t, the investigations will drag on, lead to nothing and eventually
die. Then, only conservatives’ "proof" of the UN’s duplicity will remain.

Joshua Holland (jholland@usc.edu)
is Editor-in-Chief of the USC Trojan Horse, the University of Southern
California’s "fiercely progressive voice of reason."