Claudia Rossett, who broke the U.N. Oil for Food story, reports that at least in Australia they know how to conduct an investigation. Australia’s Cole commission completed a year-long inquiry into an alleged $220 million in kickbacks paid by the Australian Wheat Board to Saddam Hussein under the U.N. Oil-for-Food program.
But some lessons are clear already. For starters, the Cole inquiry has set a standard of clarity and transparency that the U.N. itself has yet to adopt — and shows no signs of doing so. The Cole commission conducted public hearings, and appears to have posted the vital underlying documents in full on the web. The interviews of the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, chaired by Paul Volcker, were all done in secret, with snippets released at the sole discretion of Volcker and his team. And although Volcker’s $35 million inquiry — the only investigation with full access to the U.N. itself — went to the trouble of amassing an archive of some 12 million pages, much of that digitally searchable, Volcker never released many of the vital underlying documents. He now appears poised to hand the trove back at the end of next month to the same U.N. where Annan’s former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, spent months shredding executive office papers potentially relevant to the investigation.
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