May 13, 2005
Committee Releases Oil - For - Food Documents
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
Filed at 8:57 a.m. ET
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- A congressional committee has released documents purporting to contain new evidence detailing how Saddam Hussein's government sought to curry favor with France and Russia in 2002 by exploiting the U.N. oil-for-food program. It was the second time in as many days that a congressional committee had distributed papers related to oil-for-food. There are at least four such congressional probes studying the extent to which Saddam manipulated the $64 billion program to peddle influence and steal billions of dollars.
The documents released Thursday from a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce claim to show that in 2002 the Iraqi Intelligence Service drew up lists of French and Russian officials whom it hoped to influence. Iraqi intelligence hoped they would push the world body to lift crippling sanctions imposed in 1991 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
As has been previously reported, one way of doing so was essentially to bribe them under the oil-for-food program by a complex scheme that Iraq devised in the late 1990s. However, the documents provide only limited evidence that Iraqi officials actually approached some of the Russians and French in question.
Among French officials listed in the documents released Thursday is former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. On Wednesday, the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations had released documents claiming that Pasqua and a prominent British politician, George Galloway, accepted oil allocations under oil-for-food. Both denied any involvement.
Galloway called the claim ''patently absurd'' and said he would appear before the Senate committee Tuesday to defend himself.
''I'll be telling them that they are liars and that they have made a fool of America, which is supposed to be a land where justice prevails,'' he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. ''I've been pronounced guilty of this all without a single question asked of me.''
Galloway, who was expelled from Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party after urging British soldiers not to fight in Iraq, won re-election to Parliament last week as a representative of his own anti-Iraq war Respect party.
On Thursday, he lambasted the Senate committee for its methods.
''The parliamentary committee never spoke to me, never wrote to me, never asked me a single question. How it can therefore be described as an investigations committee is simply perplexing. I've been pronounced guilty of this all without a single question asked of me.''
Pasqua said he has already repeatedly denied having ''received any benefit whatsoever in whatever form from the authorities or the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.''
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 sanctions.
But Saddam twisted it to peddle influence by awarding favored politicians, journalists and other officials vouchers for Iraqi oil that could then be resold at a profit. Details of the scheme first appeared in early 2004 when the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada published a list of about 270 people, many of them French or Russian, who were suspected of profiting from Iraqi oil sales.
One letter released Thursday says Iraq should ''study the possibility to support one of the candidates in the French presidential elections after it becomes clear who is going to win.''
Another document says Saddam expressly ordered his government to work toward ''the improvement of dealing with France'' in 2002.
The committee report offers a single document that it claims supports previous allegations that oil allocations were granted to ultranationalist Russian lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Zhirinovsky has denied taking any oil from the program.
The report also includes a document purporting to show that Iraq wanted to court several Russian officials believed close to President Vladimir Putin. Among the names are the director of the Slavneft oil company, and a man identified as chairman of the Iraqi People's Solidarity Committee in St. Petersburg.
Both Slavneft and the solidarity committee were on the list al-Mada published in early 2004.