First comes the accusation and later the truth.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/un_oil_for_food

Congress Eyes U.S. Oil-For-Food Bungling By NICK WADHAMS, APWriter

UNITED NATIONS - Whether smuggled to Jordan or sold to Russian politicians,
millions of barrels of illicit Iraqi oil ultimately fueled the cars and
heated the homes of ordinary Americans, according to a U.S. Senate
subcommittee.

After accusing politicians from France, Britain and Russia of involvement
in Saddam Hussein's oil-for-food scheme, the committee focused on alleged
American complicity in a report released Monday night.

The report claimed that Washington looked the other way as Texas oil
company Bayoil bought Iraqi crude and sold it to American refineries. As a
member of the U.N. Security Council, the United States allowed Saddam to
pocket billions of dollars smuggling oil to Jordan, Turkey and Syria, it
said.

"We've got to look in the mirror at ourselves as well as point fingers at
others," Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., told
reporters in a conference call on Monday before the report was released.

The two issues were among several to be discussed at a day-long hearing
Tuesday by the subcommittee of the U.S. Committee on Homeland Security and
Government Affairs, chaired by Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman.

Coleman's subcommittee has released three reports since Thursday exploring
how Saddam made billions in illegal oil sales despite U.N. sanctions
imposed in 1991 after

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. British, French and Russian politicians took
part, the committee claimed.

Among those scheduled to testify Tuesday was George Galloway, the outspoken
British lawmaker whom Coleman's subcommittee has accused of taking vouchers
under oil-for-food.

As he got off the plane in Washington on Monday night, Galloway again
denied the allegations and said the evidence against him was forged.

"It's Mr. Coleman who's been all over the news and he's a lick-spittle,
crazed neocon who is engaged in a witch hunt against all those he perceives
to have betrayed the United States in their plan to invade and occupy
Iraq," Galloway told Associated Press Television News.

The oil-for-food program, which ran from 1996-2003, was designed to let
Saddam's government sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods to help the
Iraqi people cope with crippling U.N. sanctions.

But Saddam peddled influence by awarding favored politicians, journalists
and others vouchers for oil that could then be resold at a profit. He also
smuggled oil to Turkey, Jordan and Syria outside the program, often with
the explicit approval of the United States and the rest of the U.N.
Security Council.

Many of the allegations made by Coleman's subcommittee are not new. In
April, for example, Bayoil USA owner David Chalmers was indicted in U.S.
District Court for allegedly funneling kickbacks to Saddam. Chalmers has
denied any wrongdoing.

But rarely had the allegations been spelled out with so much detail or
scope. Coleman's investigators have interviewed former top Iraqi officials
and businessmen, who provided a behind-the-scenes look at how Saddam's
grand scheme worked.

Monday's documents, released by the minority Democrats on Coleman's
subcommittee, studied two issues: Bayoil's involvement in oil-for-food and
a single instance that saw Saddam's regime smuggle more than 7 million
barrels of oil out of the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya, apparently with U.S.
knowledge, in the weeks before the invasion in 2003.

The report found that Bayoil imported some 200 million barrels over two
years starting in September 2000 and sold it to U.S. oil companies. That
was at a time when Saddam was trying to tinker with the price of oil so
that when he sold it, companies could be compelled to pay him kickbacks.

The report claimed that Bayoil paid "directly or indirectly" some $37
million in kickbacks to Saddam even at a time that the United States and
other members of the council had realized what Saddam was doing and began
ordering price hikes to quash the kickbacks scheme.

Bayoil then sold the crude to U.S. companies, though there is no evidence
the companies knew about the kickbacks, the report said.

Chalmers' lawyer, Frank Spagnoletti, could not immediately be located for
comment late Monday. The report said Bayoil officials had refused to
cooperate with the investigation. But Chalmers himself has denied
wrongdoing in court.

The committee singled out the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, which
the United Nations repeatedly warned about Bayoil's scheme. It cited an
apparent misunderstanding in which U.S. authorities assumed the United
Nations would monitor individual companies, while at the United Nations,
oil-for-food officials thought that was the responsibility of national
governments.

The report's focus on the single instance of oil smuggling, through Khor al-
Amaya, was meant to illustrate how Saddam sold oil outside oil-for-food.

The committee cited an October report by U.S. arms inspector Charles
Duelfer saying that while Saddam pocketed more than $225 million illegally
under oil-for-food, he made some $8 billion in illegal oil sales outside
the program.

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