Oil-For-Food 2: Cash-For-Nukes

Learning nothing from the shame it suffered when it was caught funding Saddam Hussein's many lusts through oil-for-food, the UN now has had to admit it may have had a pretty good cash-for-nukes program going with the nuke-psycho regime in Pyongyang.

Here's a photo of Little Kim Jong Il and his crack generals reviewing the fissionability of crabgrass. And here's a bit of the offical UN admission it got the crazy notion to give cash to Little Kim's upstanding government:

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), aiming to address concerns over the paying of hard currency and other practices in its operations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), today officially proposed to its Executive Board an external audit and modification of future operations in the country.

“Following extensive consultations with members of the Executive Board on the DPRK country programme, we would like to suggest a way forward to address the concerns that have been raised,” said Associate Administrator Ad Melkert at a meeting in New York.

Hmmm. I wonder what Claudia Rosette would have to say about that?

Shades of Oil-for-Food, the audits of this UN program have been so secret that when the U.S. government asked to see them, UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis first said no. When U.S. diplomat Mark Wallace pressed for access, the UNDP finally let U.S. officials look at the audits and take notes at UNDP headquarters — but wouldn’t give them copies. What they saw was anything but reassuring.

So, would you give money for Melkert and his colleagues at the UNDP? If you’re a U.S. taxpayer, you already do — out of the more than $5.3 billion per year the U.S. currently lavishes on the UN system, hundreds of millions go to the UNDP, which in turn pours millions into North Korea.

I'm only not speechless because it's the UN. When Uganda, the most successful AIDS-fighting nation in Africa, didn't handle money to the UN's liking, the UN cut off all funding -- stopping AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis programs temporarily -- while at the same time it was being so lax with its own systems that Little Kim was pocketing handsful of UN cash without even having to hand over a receipt.

What sort of organization gives millions of dollars to a renegade nuclear nation? Better still, wat kind of nation would give an organization like this $5.3 billion a year?

Related Tags: UN, North Korea, Pyongyang, Oil-for-Food