UNSCAM UPDATE:

Dozens of internal United Nations audits of the troubled oil-for-food program in Iraq were routinely shown only to the U.N. official now at the center of an international scandal over kickbacks from the regime of Saddam Hussein, a congressional investigator said yesterday.

Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the General Accounting Office, told a House hearing that U.N. auditors had refused to release the internal audits to GAO investigators probing the scandal that poured an estimated $10.1 billion from secret oil sales and inflated contracts into Saddam’s coffers under the U.N. program.

Stonewalling. Imagine that!

UPDATE: Then there’s the this:

April 29, 2004 — WASHINGTON – The vast majority of the United Nations’ oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.

It’s not so mysterious, really. . . .

If this doesn’t prove that the United Nations isn’t up to the job, I don’t know what does. It’s time for a top-to-bottom housecleaning, but it won’t happen. There are too many people with their hand in the till, and too many politicians with a vested interest in pretending that the United Nations is something like the United Federation of Planets, instead of the corrupt-yet-inept dictators’ defense fund that it really is.