Fun & Games @ Turtle Bay

How is it that so many perverts ended up working for the same organization? I had thought that once the Clinton administration disbanded, we'd be done with this sort of thing.

Sex abuse allegations against U.N. peacekeepers and other staff more than doubled last year, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a report released Thursday, calling the increase "deeply troubling."

Yeah - deeply troubling because it happened on his watch and he desperately wants to evade answering for it.

There were 121 allegations in 2004 compared with 53 allegations reported in 2003, Annan said in a report to the U.N. General Assembly.

Annan said the rise in allegations could be partly due to new measures put in place by the U.N. to encourage alleged victims to come forward.

In other words, to also be let off the hook. Put another way, it appears that the only way these abuses will even be exposed at all (that the extreme media will black out this stuff is a given) is to guarantee that the perps escape any accountability for them.

The devil, as the old saying goes, is in the details.

The vast majority of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation - 105 out of the total 121 - were leveled at U.N. peacekeepers.

Forty-five percent of allegations against peacekeepers involved sex with minors and 15% involved rape or sexual assault. Thirty-one percent involved prostitution with adult women and the rest involved other forms of sexual exploitation and abuse. Allegations against 53 uniformed personnel were substantiated.

Abuses have been reported in peacekeeping missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor, West Africa and Congo. While allegations of abuse have dogged peacekeeping missions since their inception 50 years ago, the issue was thrust into the spotlight after the United Nations found earlier this year that peacekeepers in Congo had sex with Congolese women and girls, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.

The remaining charges include:

-UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency, reported two allegations against its personnel of sex with a minor.

-The World Food Program was investigating one allegation of sexual exploitation which the report characterized as "sex for food."

-The Office of Internal Oversight Services, the U.N.'s internal watchdog, reported one allegation of sex with a prostitute but closed the case after the staff member resigned.

-The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported 10 cases, including six that were either unsubstantiated or closed and four that were pending further investigation.

-The U.N. Volunteers Program reported two cases, including one which was dismissed and another which was pending further investigation.

It always bears repeating: this is the kind of organization to which the American left insists that our national soveriegnty and foreign policy-making be turned over to lock, stock, and barrel.

But it gets even better, because, at least as pertains to the sprawling Oily Food mess, Secretary-General and United-Earth-President-for-Life-in-his-dreams Kofi Annan may have {GASP} lied to probers of the scandal.

U.N. investigators have turned over to Congress boxes of evidence on the Oil-for-Food program, including "proof" that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lied to the Independent Inquiry Committee probing the scandal, Fox News Channel reporter Jonathan Hunt said Thursday.

"One source close to the case told me that in those boxes is the ammunition to prove that Kofi Annan lied to investigators," Hunt told Fox News Radio host Tony Snow. "So this is a very dramatic development indeed."

Hunt said the documents had been in the possession of U.N. investigator Robert Parton, who resigned from the probe two weeks ago charging that Annan was being let off the hook.

"The boxes contain the almost complete records of Parton's investigation," Hunt told Snow, explaining, "It looks very embarrassing for Kofi Annan right now - it's a very bad thing."

The "very bad thing" for ol' Kofi would be the publicity of his duplicity, something that now looks like it's going to be busted wide open.

Congress has been trying to talk to Parton and another prober, Miranda Duncan, since they resigned, Fox News reported on its Web site. But Paul Volcker, who heads the Oil-for-Food probe, tried to block their testimony, insisting the duo had diplomatic immunity.

Senator Norm Coleman, who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he's prepared to issue subpoenas that would force Parton and Duncan to testify over Volcker's objections.

The very notion of UN internal investigators being so reluctant to cooperate with external counterparts is damning in and of itself. But this development not only means the exposure of Annan as a co-conspirator in at least the coverup of this affair, but points to the so-called Independent Inquiry Committee being its primary vehicle and reason for existing.

If this is a disaster for the Sec-Gen, its biggest beneficiary would seem to be John Bolton, whose view of the "world body" is being vindicated redundantly on a daily basis to the point of gratuitous overkill. It'll be awfully difficult for Dems on the Foreign Relations Committee to convincingly argue that Mr. Bolton's alleged surliness outweighs the dysfunctional outrages cited above.

It's never been clearer that "business as usual" at Turtle Bay must come to an end. Either that den of vipers is turned upside down and completely fumigated, or its bread & circuses act can be re-located to someplace (read Old Europe) that actually smiles on, if you will, drinking from the same pot you piss in.

Pity Kofi can't be assigned as Saddam Hussein's cell mate. Those would be some fascinating conversations.