Repug Déjà vu All Over Again

As I read this about the latest hijinks with Norm Coleman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, I was reminded of that Groucho Marx joke about a woman making a man very happy…if she would just go away (we should be so lucky with these two).

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Republicans in the U.S. Congress are accusing the U.N. Development Program of firing a whistle-blower connected with the agency's North Korea program, a target of the Bush administration.

Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who last week sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said Artjon Shkurtaj, chief of operations in North Korea in 2005 to 2006, was dismissed for criticizing the UNDP.

Gee, I would have thought our ol’ buddy Norm would have learned to keep his mouth shut about stuff like this after he got clobbered by British MP George Galloway in May 2005 (though Galloway is hardly innocent himself, but he was wronged on this occasion…and by the way, Go Al!).

On Thursday, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida also sent a letter to Ban, urging him to intervene to protect Shkurtaj, who she said had uncovered "significant irregularities."

The Bush administration accuses the agency of sloppy accounting, handing over cash to North Korean bodies without proper documentation and hiring government-picked staff.

Yep, if there’s one thing Bushco knows about, it’s sloppy accounting and handing over cash without documentation (as noted here)…

The 15-month proconsulship of the (Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority) disbursed nearly $20 billion, two-thirds of it in cash, most of which came from the Development Fund for Iraq that had replaced the UN Oil for Food Program and from frozen and seized Iraqi assets. Most of the money was flown into Iraq on C-130s in huge plastic shrink-wrapped pallets holding 40 “cashpaks,” each cashpak having $1.6 million in $100 bills. Twelve billion dollars moved that way between May 2003 and June 2004, drawn from accounts administered by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The $100 bills weighed an estimated 363 tons.

Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent. There was also considerable money “off the books,” including as much as $4 billion from illegal oil exports. The CPA and the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Board, which it controlled, made a deliberate decision not to record or “meter” oil exports, an invitation to wholesale fraud and black marketeering.

Back to the story…

Shkurtaj, an Albanian, reportedly discovered in 2005 a stack of counterfeit dollars from North Korea that UNDP had put in a safe after they were handed to the agency 10 years earlier by an Egyptian consultant who had discovered they were fake.

The UNDP said it tried to return the notes to the North Koreans in 1995 but they refused to accept them and proper receipts were lacking from the Egyptian. The agency apparently put them in a safe and forgot about the notes until this year when they contacted U.S. officials.

How ridiculous to drag up all of this counterfeiting business again when it looks like we may actually have made progress with North Korea on dismantling its nuclear reactor (I know I said in a comment awhile back that this story will be with us forever, but I’d love to be wrong about that).

Ros-Lehtinen said Shkurtaj attempted to raise the issue with UNDP in 2005 but instead had been relieved of his duties. He applied to the U.N. for whistle-blower status.

And how even more ridiculous for Ros-Lehtinen to care about a U.N. whistle blower while not saying or doing anything in defense of whistle blowers in this country (here and here).

"This request is being reviewed by the Ethics Office, and that is where the status is, right now," U.N. Deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe told reporters.

According to UNDP officials, Shkurtaj left North Korea in August 2006 and left the program in March 2007, after fulfilling several short-term contracts.

Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was successful in getting the House last week to cut $20 million of funding to UNDP. The Senate still has to vote.

UNDP pulled out of North Korea in March after Pyongyang refused to accept changes ordered by its board of directors. A U.N. audit published on June 1 said rule breaches had occurred but did not find systematic major diversion of U.N. funding.

So, if UNDP has already pulled out of North Korea, what is the point in punishing the relief agency instead of the (allegedly) offending country?

David Morrison, UNDP spokesman, said the agency had taken the U.S. allegations very seriously and investigated them.

"The information supplied to UNDP by the U.S. mission meant to substantiate the allegations does not tally with UNDP's own financial records," he said.

But U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters last week: "I'm advised by our people that they have a variety of sources pointing in the same direction with regard to potential abuses."

Sounds like the Repugs are closing ranks again.

U.S. officials insist their investigation is not political, The former UNDP administrator, Mark Malloch Brown, clashed with former U.S. United Nations ambassador John Bolton.

The current deputy UNDP administrator, Ad Melkert, headed the World Bank's ethics committee that contributed to the downfall of former bank president Paul Wolfowitz, a former Bush administration official.

I think we have the answer.

Khalilzad and other U.S. officials, however, have praised the current administrator, Kemal Dervis, for his handling of the controversy.

Of course – that gives them cover for sticking it to Melkert.

(Sigh – is the weekend here yet?).