By Judi McLeod
Monday, September 17, 2007
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that the United Nations is a weird place.
A textbook example of urban sprawl, United Nations headquarters is an 18-acre site in an international zone, which belongs not to the U.S. but to all member states. Diplomats who people the world's largest bureaucracy are covered by diplomatic immunity, which could explain why some crooks involved with the never ending Oil for Food scandal are still at large.
If there were ever a need to find something lost within United Nations properties, it would take months if not years to find it.
The Lost and Found at the UN show you never know what's going to be unearthed in the countless nooks and crannies of the United Nations.
Weeks ago it was vials of dangerous chemicals, which had been removed from Iraq a decade ago.
The FBI had to be called in to help remove the substances.
"The material was phosgene, a chemical warfare agent, UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe told a news conference," (Reuters.com, Aug. 20, 2007).
Couldn't it be argued that UN inspectors on the hunt for Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction were looking in the wrong place?
Ironically or even comically, the substances were discovered by the Iraqi weapons inspectors!
"The Iraqi weapons inspectors came across the materials as they were closing their offices, which are housed in a building near UN headquarters in Manhattan, said Ewen Buchanan a spokesman for the inspectors."
It was moving day for the weapons inspectors as the UN is currently embarked on a multi-million dollar project to renovate to renovate it New York digs.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, phosgene was used extensively during World War I as a choking agent.
How vials removed from Iraq a decade ago ended up at the UN on weapon inspectors' moving day is a mystery on par with the "black box" flight recorder found in Kofi Annan's locked file cabinet, at the UN Peacekeeping Department.
Kofi's black box was originally thought to be the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) from the 1994 aircraft crash that triggered the Rwanda genocide.
A week after its discovery, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS)--the UN'S Internal watchdog--took the so-called black box to the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington, D.C., where it was opened in the presence of experts from the international Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), another UN agency.
Spokesman Fred Eckhard said some conversation in French could be made out on the 30-minute tape, but nothing linked the CVR to the April 6, 1994 crash of the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart
Cyprian Ntayamira. Their deaths set off a chain of killings and massacres throughout Rwanda that year, with the death toll from the genocide totaling more than 800,000 souls, mostly minority Tutsis and "moderate" Hutu.
Just like the vials of dangerous chemicals, the black box had been discovered only after the passing of 10 years.
Smooth-talking Annan, still Secretary-General on the day the black box was discovered in his file cabinet, registered surprise" "It sounds like a foul-up, a first-class foul-up," he admitted to reporters.
It took the accusation of the French attorney general, who charged the UN with obstructing his investigation into the 1994 crash by hiding the flight recorder, to get at the truth.
"There is no black box, I don't know what you're talking about," UN spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters, reinforcing his comments with the pretext of peeking under his desk.
Within days, Eckhard was backtracking and now admitting that a black box had indeed been found.
With the UN $9-billion renovation getting under way next month, employees will be moving into temporary digs.
Long gone are the billions of dollars lost in the UN Oil-for-Food scandal and the green Mercedes SUV that Kofi's son Kojo bought in Europe and shipped to Ghana at a cost savings of more than $20,000 by making false use of his father's name and privileges as United Nations secretary-general.
But cramped space and asbestos pollution notwithstanding, UN headquarters is a classic hidey-hole. God knows what will be unearthed there next.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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