The Central Intelligence
Agency has published hundreds of names of people, firms,
political parties and government officials Saddam Hussein
purportedly tried to buy off to get UN sanctions lifted.
At the same time, Saddam
and his government managed to amass some $11 billion through
shadowy deals to circumvent the sanctions, first imposed
in 1990 and lifted after the US-led invasion a year ago,
said the report, released on Wednesday.
The report was part of
a 1,200-page survey for the CIA by Charles Duelfer, a
former UN weapons inspector, who concluded Iraq had no
stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons or a nuclear
arms program before the US invasion last year.
It was published on the
CIA’s Website: www.cia.gov.
The former government’s
scheme included making deals with firms in Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to
acquire prohibited items, the report said.
The published lists show
how much oil individuals, political parties or firms from
more than 40 countries purportedly were allocated and
the names of the companies contracted to lift oil on their
behalf.
The list cited names from
France, Russia and China, all permanent members of the
UN Security Council, which supervised the program.
Accusations again emerged
against Benon Sevan, head of the now-defunct UN oil-for-food
humanitarian program that handled $67 billion. He is listed
as a UN official, called Mr Sifan, and has vigorously
denied the allegations.
The United Nations has
said it had turned over all documents to an investigatory
commission headed by Paul Volcker, the former US Federal
Reserve chairman.
Others on the lengthy list
include Russian ultra nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky
and his Russian Liberal Democrat Party, Charles Pasqua,
a former French interior minister, Indonesian President
Megawati Sukarnoputri, the son of Lebanese President Emile
Lahoud and the Peoples Liberation Front of Palestine.
The lists, parts of which
had been published previously, were compiled from 13 secret
files maintained by former Iraqi vice-president Taha Yassin
Ramadan and the former oil minister, Amir Rashid.
But there was no independent
verification. “We name those individuals and entities
here in the interest of candour, clarity and thoroughness,”
the report said, adding that it did not “investigate
or judge those non-Iraqi individuals.”
Several US firms were on
the list but their names were not released because of
privacy laws.
Iraq was under a sweeping
UN trade embargo beginning August 1990 after it invaded
Kuwait. The sanctions were lifted after the US invasion.
At the end of 1996, the
United Nations and Iraq began the oil-for-food program
that allowed Baghdad to buy civilian goods and sell oil
to pay for them under UN monitoring. But since 1990, Iraq,
openly shipped oil by truck to Jordan and Turkey, with
the United States and others turning a blind eye.
The report said oil deals
with various governments generated over $7.5 billion for
Saddam from the early 1990s until the start of the 2003
war. Iraq earned an additional $3 billion from kickbacks
or surcharges on oil, smuggling and other schemes, the
report said.
