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Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Those incriminating Oil-for-Food documents
Claudia Rosett, the indefatigable Wall Street Journal columnist whose work on the Oil-for-Food program merits a Pulitzer and more, has another important column today on her favourite topic. Rosett touches on some intelligence files pertaining to Oil-for-Food "allegedly held" by Ahmad Chalabi:
And then, of course, there's the hoard of documents allegedly held by Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. Mr. Chalabi was one of the first to call for serious investigation of Oil-for-Food, based on what he has described as "damning documents" found in government offices in Baghdad, implicating senior officials of both the U.N. and various unnamed nations. Mr. Chalabi, according to his Washington-based adviser, Francis Brooke, recovered enough of Saddam's paperwork last year to fill three basketball courts chest-high. Of this hoard, says Mr. Brooke, some 20,000 pages relate directly to Oil-for-Food, most of them from the files of the Finance Ministry--which was just one of the many Iraqi ministries involved in this program.
When I was in Baghdad last May, I saw these alleged documents. They were part of a huge stash of files recovered by the INC from the Mukhabarat (Iraqi intelligence service) headquarters in the days after the war's end. I cannot say for sure that what I saw were the supposedly incriminating Oil-for-Food documents, but I saw a ton of intelligence documents. So when the INC says they recovered "enough of Saddam's paperwork last year to fill three basketball courts chest-high," believe me, they are not fibbing. Rosett is right to say that Chalabi should just release the documents.
Anyway, I took these pictures of what I saw:
Keep in mind that these were just two sections of a huge warehouse!
The greater question, which Rosett doesn't explicity note in her piece, is this: Is Chalabi's possession of incriminating Oil-for-Food documents part of the reason for the obvious vendetta against him?
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 6:54 PM
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