Saddam Hussein personally directed a worldwide scheme using valuable Iraqi oil to secretly win the support of officials from dozens of countries, according to a bombshell new report yesterday that named names. Saddam himself approved the names of international political and business figures who received lucrative oil vouchers — and added or deleted benefactors on a whim, the report by U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found. Other senior Iraqi regime officials could recommend individuals or organizations to be added, and an ad hoc committee even met to review the recommendations before passing them along to Saddam. Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, which compiled the 1,200-page report, interviewed scores of high-ranking members of Saddam's regime to learn the intricacies of the bribery scandal and also had access to interviews with Saddam. Duelfer said he also confronted former Vice President Taha Yason Ramadan Al-Jizrawi with a captured document indicating his major role in allocating oil contracts and "he divulged details on corruption stemming from" the U.N. oil-for-food program.
The report included 13 detailed lists of oil-deal recipients obtained from the vice president, but did not say whether U.S. officials had tried to verify the names on the list. All the names of American and British companies and individuals, whether suspected of wrongdoing or not, were deleted from the list before it was made public. Parts of the lists had been published by an Iraqi newspaper in Baghdad after the war in March 2003. The American firms are being investigated by the U.S. attorneys in New York and Texas for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Business Practices Act.