United abominations contragolpe from the UN

While checking the link to United abominations in my previous post, I came across a link to a "rebuttal" from the UN to the title track of the album.

The UN blogger, Mark Leon Goldberg, takes the song apart and exposes all of Mustaine's drivel for what it is. An excerpt:

Poverty in their kitchens
Held hostage by oil-for-food
Yet their own plates are full off the fat of their lands
There's no blood on their hands, right Kojo?
They promised to tell the truth
Without leaving a fingerprint, but
They will lose the UN one way or another
The victim, I fear will be us, sisters and brothers.

Assuming the antecedent to the pronoun "they" refers to the UN Secretariat, lead singer and guitarist Dave Mustaine (whose voice we now hear) seems to be implying that UN staffers are enriching themselves while the poor in their country suffer. His evidence is the alleged corruption in the Oil-for-Food program, which allowed Saddam Hussein's government to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian items. The rarely stated truth about the Oil-for-Food program is that it did what is was intended to do -- prevent a humanitarian crisis in Iraq while exerting economic pressure on Saddam Hussein and keeping weapons of mass destruction out of his hands.

An investigation of alleged corruption in the Oil-for-Food program, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, found that only one UN staffer, the Cypriot Benan Sevan, had solicited kickbacks from the Iraqi government. He was summarily fired and is now under indictment by a United States federal court. Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, was dragged into the Oil-for-Food witch hunt following accusations that he used personal connections to steer a UN contract to a company that employed him as a consultant. The Volcker investigation cleared Kofi Annan of any wrong doing, and Kojo has never been accused of committing any crimes. In fact, he won a libel lawsuit against a British tabloid which accused him of smuggling Iraqi oil.

The oft-quoted "$13 billion" of corruption actually refers almost entirely to illegal oil smuggling by the Hussein regime. This was supposed to be regulated by members of Security Council (including the United States, which has a veto), not the UN administrators of the Oil-for-Food program.

An amusing read. A pity that the site is completely broken in both FF and Opera :S