Oily

As the real Oil For Food scandal begins to boil, another group is eager to prove that the US is just as bad as the UN. "What group?" you ask, "The EU? The Arab League? The World Socialist Party?" No.

Congressional Democrats:

Democrats on the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations are looking into whether the United States or other countries were told that Iraq was trading oil with neighboring countries in violation of the sanctions, a minority investigator said. The minority staff will also look specifically into the shipments from Khor al-Amaya, the investigator said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing a committee policy prohibiting staff members from giving on-the-record interviews.

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Bush administration officials have not explained why they did not stop the exports from Khor al-Amaya, but they were fully aware of Jordan's oil trade with Iraq. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations repeatedly notified Congress that they were waiving U.S. restrictions on assistance to Jordan and Turkey for importing Iraqi oil in violation of sanctions, according to documents supplied by congressional investigators.

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Jordan has relied almost entirely on Iraqi crude since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when its main oil supplier, Saudi Arabia, cut off shipments because of Amman's support of Hussein. After the war, the government of Jordanian King Hussein asked the Security Council for an exemption from the trade sanctions.

The 15-nation council "took note" of the request and then largely ignored Iraq's exports of discounted crude to Jordan outside the oil-for-food program.

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The oil trade "was certainly a technical violation of the sanctions," said James Placke, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs during the Reagan administration and a retired Middle East analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Jordan, to its credit, notified the council, but the council didn't act."

Placke said most of the oil was trucked across the Iraqi border to Jordan's refinery in Zarqa, about 30 miles north of Amman. But several weeks before the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Jordan began loading massive quantities of oil from Khor al-Amaya. "They could see they were likely to get caught in an oil squeeze," Placke said.

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Before the invasion, the Jordanians contacted several international brokers to hire tankers willing to ship Iraqi crude from the Persian Gulf, according to Preston Carter, a broker who participated in the trade. During the war, Jordan hired scores of tankers to store crude at sea in the gulf, according to a spokesman for Tankship Transport Ltd., the Bahamian-based company that owned one of the ships.

"As far as I'm aware, there was nothing surreptitious or secret going on, and none of the [tanker] owners were trying to hide," said Carter, the managing director of London-based Petrian Shipbrokers.

Sounds like a case of need, but certainly whether something fishy was going on or not, the Dems will find an answer. The full story is here, but don't miss Austin Bay's coverage of the real story here.