Latest spin on UN scandal.

ITEM: One headline in the Washington Post on March 30 read, "Kofi Annan Cleared in Corruption Probe." The accompanying article then stetted. "A U.N. appointed panel investigating abuse in the Iraq oil-for-food program said there is no evidence that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan used his influence to steer a multimillion-dollar contract to a Swiss company that employed his son."

ITEM: The Boston Globe also on March 30 featured a store' entitled, "Report clears UN chief of corruption allegations."

CORRECTION: Notwithstanding the headlines in the Washington Post and Boston Globe, the report on the investigation of the oil-for-food scandal did not say Kofi Annan was innocent of wrongdoing. Even a senior fellow from the globalist Council on Foreign Relations, Charles Kupchan, was forced to admit to the New York Times that, while the report "explicitly said it did not find enough evidence to hold [Annan] culpable, it did not say it found enough evidence to exonerate him."

What was also demonstrated is that Annan is guilty of ineptitude, conflict of interest, and deliberate neglect. When Kofi Annan boasted that the Volcker Commission "has cleared me of any wrongdoing," he boasted, in essence, that investigators had proved that he was clueless, not corrupt.

At the heart of the Volcker probe was the oil-for-food program. This scheme boiled down to UN officials, as well as international businessmen and diplomats, accepting bribes from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the form of oil allocations. The supposed rationale for the program, which occurred during an embargo of Baghdad, was to allow Iraq to sell oil to buy food and medicine. The $64 billion program predictably became a magnet for corruption and fraud, with the willing assistance of top United Nations personnel.

This report was the second issued by the Volcker Commission. (The first detailed the atrocious oversight of oil-for-food by the world body, including kickbacks to the head of the program.) Investigators also discovered that Kofi Annan's chief of staff ordered the shredding of three years of records. These documents covered the time when a contract was given to a Swiss company that employed Annan's son--and had hired him, the firm admitted, to get business from the UN. Annan's chief of staff, Ikbal Riza, ordered the shredding a day after the Security Council announced an investigation of the program.

Kofi's own son "intentionally deceived" the investigators, said the report. He refused to cooperate with the probe, terming it "part of a broader Republican political agenda."

The Swiss company, Cotecna, was given its contract when the firm's chief executive was under indictment for money-laundering, a fact then on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The investigators, as summarized by the Washington Times, "also found that Kojo Annan, hired out of college for a training program, was eventually paid more than $400,000--at least twice as much as he or Cotecna had previously acknowledged--and often through circuitous routes."

Kofi Annan, incredibly, has tried to use the scandal as a springboard to grab more power for the UN. The secretary-general, noted Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal, "forges on to propose nothing less than reforming the entire known tmiverse, via the U.N., while he bangs the drum for a budget to match. He wants to expand his own staff, change the world's climate, end organized crime, eliminate all private weapons, and double U.N.-directed development aid to the tune of at least $100 billion a year, 'front-loaded,' for his detailed plan to end world poverty. This comes from a U.N. that only three months ago was finally strong-armed by Congress into coughing up the secret internal Oil for Food audits confirming that under Mr. Annan's stewardship the U.N. was not even adequately auditing its own staff operations."