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Panel Says Australian Company Paid Bribes    [

    The Melbourne Minutes: New Downing Street Memos From Down Under
    By David Swanson
    t r u t h o u t | Guest Columnist

    Tuesday 28 November 2006

    More than a year before the United States launched an endless war on Iraq in what President George W. Bush told Congress was an urgently needed action to prevent an attack with non-existent weapons by non-Iraqi terrorists ...

    Eleven months before Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair [http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/whitehousememo] that a good way to start a war on Iraq would be to paint planes with UN colors, fly them low, and get them shot at ...

    Five months before the Downing Street Minutes were taken at a meeting revealing the knowledge top British officials had of the secret war plans of the Bush administration ...

    Just a week or two before several of the Downing Street Memos recorded US-British discussions of the coming war ...

    On February 27, 2002 - just five months after 15 Saudis, 2 Lebanese, and 2 Yemenis flew airplanes into US buildings - Trevor Flugge, who was then chairman of AWB, the Australian Wheat Board, a private corporation, told AWB's board that John Dauth, who was then Australia's ambassador to the United Nations, had revealed to Flugge the plans of the US and Australian governments for war on Iraq. Tragically for war profiteers everywhere, somebody took minutes of the meeting.

    You may not have heard about this from the US media. Maybe if we all scream really loudly for six weeks you will. That's how the Downing Street Minutes found their 15 minutes of fame in June 2005. But, as we stuff our faces with dead turkeys, the new Melbourne Minutes are the top news story in Australia. According to the Australian Associated Press:

Mr Dauth briefed Mr Flugge in New York in February 2002 - 13 months before the invasion - and the details appear in minutes of AWB's February 27 board meeting tendered to the inquiry.

"The ambassador stated that he believed that US military action to depose Saddam Hussein was inevitable and that at this time the Australian government would support and participate in such action," the minutes say. "The ambassador believed that the Iraqis grossly underestimated the US reaction to September 11 (with the consequent military response in Afghanistan) and that Iraq's request to renegotiate UN weapons inspectors was a direct result of their nervousness about US action. The ambassador believed that the latest olive branch from the Iraqis was likely to stave off US action [for] 12 to 18 months but that some military action was inevitable."

0aMr Dauth - now high commissioner in New Zealand - predicted the Iraq war would be similar to the campaign in Afghanistan, with heavy use of air support followed by the deployment of ground troops.

"He undertook to ensure that AWB was given as much warning as would be possible under such circumstances, but noted that in these instances often the Australian government had little notification," the board minutes said.

    Where have we heard that word "inevitable" before? Oh, yeah: the Downing Street Minutes: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

    Why are we hearing about the minutes of this Australian meeting only now? Well, the minutes have been released by a government investigation into AWB's bribing of Saddam Hussein's government in order to win contracts to export Australian wheat to Iraq. That investigation may now be expanded in Australia. It's also one that the incoming Democratic chairs of the House and Senate agriculture committees in the US committed last week to investigating. What will they do now, with the wheat-bribe scandal having taken this interesting twist?

    The past six years of near-zero Congressional oversight in Washington is one reason Americans' knowledge of the planning of the Iraq War comes largely from foreign sources. But, if members of the Australian government were passing word around, I shudder to think how many people in the right circles in Washington, DC, knew the score but kept their mouths shut and are keeping them shut to this very day. It's clear that members of the US corporate media elite were in the know. In fact, if you ask them to condescend to notice this Australian news, they'll almost certainly tell you it's "old news," that they knew it all four years ago. They did, but they didn't tell the rest of us.

    Now here we are, years later, still killing and dying in Iraq, and proposing to attack Iran on the basis of lies almost identical to those used to justify the initial attack on Iraq.

    We must demand that the new Congress block any new wars and cut off funding for the current one. We must also demand investigations immediately into the lies that launched the war and the conducting of the war. American citizens are the last to know what our government is doing. We're used to that, but there is no reason we need wait any longer. If the subpoenas don't start piling up in the White House mailbox on New Year's Day, we will have established two critical facts:

1. Future presidents are free to ignore all laws.
2. Democrats are just Republicans with manners.

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    Panel Says Australian Company Paid Bribes
    By Raymond Bonner
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 28 November 2006

    Sydney, Australia - A high-level commission investigating corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program released a long-awaited report on Monday stating unequivocally that a major Australian wheat company paid more than $224 million in kickbacks and bribes to Saddam Hussein's government.

    The commission also found that the company, AWB Ltd., had "deliberately and dishonestly" devised a scheme for the payments - from 1999 until the overthrow of Mr. Hussein in 2003 - to deceive the United Nations. When the United Nations conducted its investigation in 2005, headed by Paul A. Volcker, AWB withheld thousands of pages of documents and its lawyers made statements to Mr. Volcker that were patently false, the commission found.

    The Australian commission's report was the most thorough - and damning - investigation of corruption in the United Nation's oil-for-food program. It is certain to have repercussions for politicians in Canberra as well as in Washington, where incoming Democratic Congressional representatives have pledged to hold their own hearings.

    The program was intended to alleviate the hardships of the Iraqi people while isolating Saddam Hussein's government. Its aim was to allow Iraq to trade some oil for food and other necessities under close United Nations supervision while the country remained under international sanctions.

    Instead, the report found that both AWB and the Iraqi government used the program for profit.

    In Canberra, the government of Prime Minister John Howard claimed vindication because the commission declared that it found no evidence that any government officials had actual knowledge of AWB's kickback scheme.

    But the commission's chairman, Terence Cole, a retired state supreme court justice, left open the question of whether Australian officials could, or should, have known about the scheme - all AWB contracts were submitted to the government for approval - if they had conducted their own investigation. His mandate from the government for the inquiry did not include that question, he said.

    The opposition leader, Kim Beazley, said that even if the government was not criminally culpable, it was at least negligent and incompetent for not knowing about the kickbacks.

    The scheme AWB and the Iraqi government set up for making the kickbacks involved using a Jordanian trucking company, Alia, which was a front for the Iraqi government, the report concluded.

    At first AWB paid Alia $12 for each ton of wheat it sold to the Iraqi government, money that went into the pockets of Iraqi officials. Later, the amount was increased by the Iraqi government to $55 a ton, which included a so-called service fee. The money was ostensibly for moving the wheat inland from the Iraqi port. But Alia had no trucks in Iraq.

    AWB then passed on the cost of the bribes to the United Nations by recovering the inflated payments from the oil-for-food program's escrow account.

    The commission's report - 2,065 pages in five volumes, costing more than $7 million and taking nearly a year to compile - was based on the testimony it took from some 70 AWB and Australian government officials during 75 days of public hearings. It also examined more than 1,500 internal company and government documents. (The report can be found at www.oilforfoodinquiry.gov.au).

    When investigated by the Volcker commission, which found that AWB was the largest payer of kickbacks to Iraq under the oil-for-food program, lawyers said that the company had been deceived by Iraq and Alia, and that it did not know Alia was a front for the Iraqi government and had never paid a service fee.

    AWB lawyers repeatedly denied that the company had any knowledge that the payments it was making to Alia were in fact going to the Iraqi government.

    "Neither statement was true," Mr. Cole concluded, rejecting the claims almost in totality.

    "The facts are not now in doubt," he said.

    Mr. Cole was blistering in his criticism of AWB, which has had a monopoly on wheat exports. The illegal payment scheme grew out of a "lack of culture of ethical dealing" at AWB, he said. He was also noticeably critical of AWB's lawyers for advising the company on how to hide the payments, and for lying to the Volcker commission.

    The commission recommended that criminal prosecutions be considered against 11 AWB officials, including the general counsel, and against a former officer of BHP Billiton, one of the world's largest mining companies, who, Mr. Cole said, may have "conspired with or aided and abetted AWB" in transferring $8 million to the Iraqi government as a part of debt said to be owed to BHP.

    BHP issued a statement on Monday, saying that it had received the Cole Commission report, and would have no further comment until it had reviewed it and completed its own internal investigation.

    The current chairman of AWB, Brendan Stewart, who replaced one of the men who now faces criminal charges, said the company "deeply regrets" the manner in which the trade with Iraq was conducted. He said the company would issue a fuller statement in the next few days.

    In Washington, Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is slated to become chairman of the Senate Agricultural Committee in January, has indicated that he will hold hearings on AWB's wheat contracts in Iraq.

    "The exact form and details of the inquiry have yet to be decided, although the report issued by the Cole Commission should be quite helpful to our efforts," Mr. Harkin said in a statement Monday.

    During the commission's hearing here, documents were introduced showing that in 2003, when the allegations of AWB's bribes began to seep out, the Australian ambassador, Michael Thawley, lobbied senior administration officials in Washington on AWB's behalf. It is not clear what, if anything, they did.

    The ambassador also lobbied Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican and chairman of the investigations subcommittee, who had been a loud critic of corruption in the oil-for-food program, but called off an investigation after being assured by Mr. Thawley that AWB had done nothing illegal. Mr. Coleman later said he had been misled by the ambassador. He said Monday that he would "review the Cole report with a fine-tooth comb to determine whether U.S. interests were hurt by AWB's gross misconduct." A major concern, he said, "is whether Australian officials were less than honest in their dealings with the subcommittee."

    Mr. Thawley has said that the representations he made to Mr. Coleman were based on assurances from AWB that it had not made any illegal payments.

    The U.S. Wheat Associates, an organization that promotes American wheat exports, could also claim vindication. In June 2003, it wrote a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, suggesting that AWB was inflating its wheat contracts and that some of the excess had gone to the Iraqi government.

    The Australian government called the allegations "slanderous and outrageous" at the time and said they were part of an "insidious campaign" by AWB's chief competitor in the Iraqi wheat market.