"Oil-for-food" coverup.

Here's a little pop quiz you can use on your neighbors or the water cooler gang at the office. First question: Have you seen the latest CSI: New York episode? Second question: Have you seen the latest PSI: New York episode? PSI: New York--what's that? We'll get back to that in just a moment. But first, for those fortunate enough not to own a television, CSI: NY is a CBS spin-off of CSI: Miami, which is a spin-off of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, one of those high-tech, grittily realistic, crime investigation dramas that use the latest techniques of forensic science to capture criminals. Seems almost every network has its own CSI-type crime solvers.

So, one might reasonably expect that the apparent public fascination with CSI-style dramas and their reality-show imitators would translate into sensational audience appeal for the real-life PSI. So, what is PSI? Never heard of it? Don't feel bad, tens of millions of your fellow Americans haven't heard of it either. PSI is the acronym for the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been digging into one of the biggest, most sensational crime sprees of the decade: the UN's infamously corrupt oil-for-food program in Iraq. It should be a Page One daily headliner. After all, PSI has everything going for it: mass murder, terrorism, torture, bribery, extortion, fraud, graft, coverup, and obstruction --on a colossal, global scale. This tops your wildest CSI dream episode: O.J. Simpson meets Scott Peterson, meets Enron, meets Osama bin Laden, meets The Sopranos.

But the kingpins of Big Media--who feed us endless blow-by-blow "news" accounts of the investigations of Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant, and Scott Peterson--for some reason suffer from chronic attention deficit disorder when it comes to PSI's investigation of the international mafiosi operating out of the UN headquarters on New York's East River. Yes, there's a sporadic, 20-second news blip or an occasional headline on page 5 (or, more likely, page 25) about the latest revelations concerning the UN's gigantic oil-for-food scare, but nothing that comes close to competing with Martha or Kobe--or the latest racy episode of CSI.

If you were reading the Washington Post on November 16, for instance, you might be excused for missing the story on page A 17 entitled, "Iraq Gained $21 Billion Illicitly, Senate Panel Says." This was the Post's idea of "coverage" of the huge news coming out of the PSI's hearings on November 15. In case you missed the story altogether--which is entirely possible, since the Post's coverage of the subject is typical of Big Media's overall performance on the issue --the Senate PSI announced that (thanks to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his UN minions) Saddam Hussein had skimmed $21 billion off the UN's oil-for-food scam. That's more than double previous government estimates of Saddam's illegal revenue under this UN program, which began in 1996.

However, it is not just the sheer magnitude of this world-class swindle that should cause outrage. And it's not just the fact that Kofi and the East River Mafia sold the oil-for-food program as a humanitarian effort to provide food and medicine to orphans and starving children--and then knowingly allowed it to be used instead as a huge slush fund for Saddam and the politicians, UN officials, and corporate elitists who fed at his trough.

As bad as all that is, it doesn't begin to tell the story. Because the oil-for-food scandal is not just about billions of dollars that were wasted once upon a time and now are gone--end of story. What is of far greater and more immediate importance is that big chunks of that illicit UN cash flow may right now be financing the Baathist and Shiite "insurgents" who are killing U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq. Yes, if your husband, son, brother, father, sister, or daughter is in harm's way in Iraq, you should know that Kofi Annan and his fellow UN "humanitarians" have, for months, been blocking (and continue to block) the investigations that might uncover enormous oil-for-food stashes, de-fund the insurgents, and bring many of the guilty to justice.

On November 9, Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), the PSI's chairman, together with the subcommittee's ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, sent a blistering letter to Mr. Annam taking him to task for "the U.N.'s refusal to produce the relevant documents and give access to key personnel." The letter also charged the UN with "affirmatively preventing the Subcommittee from receiving documents" from oil-for-food contractors.

"The question that hangs out there is, how high up does the corruption go?" said Senator Coleman in his opening statement on November 15. "The extent to which U.N. officials personally benefited from Saddam's influence peddling has not been fully explored," he added. "I am angered," said the senator, "by the proactive interference from the U.N. with our efforts to question groups contracted by the U.N. to oversee parts of this program."

Now, here's the final pop quiz question: Are you angered enough by the UN's stonewalling, subversion, and treachery to tell President Bush and the Congress it's time to get the U.S. out of the UN, and the UN out of the U.S.?