BBC (Friday): UN debates Iraqi oil funds

[Jack Rabbit]

From the BBC Online
Dated Friday December 5 12:36 GMT (4:36 am PST)

UN debates Iraqi oil funds
By Greg Barrow
BBC correspondent at the UN

A new body set up to monitor the use of Iraq's oil funds holds its first meeting at the United Nations in New York on Friday.
The International Advisory and Monitoring Board was established by the Security Council in a resolution passed in May this year.
But long-running negotiations with the coalition provisional authority in Iraq have delayed it getting down to work.
In the time it has taken to get this monitoring body up and running, the occupying powers in Iraq have already spent more than $1.5bn of Iraq's oil money - cash that has been used to repair Iraq's infrastructure and to buy food for its people.

In the words of Woody Guthrie in The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd:

All through this world you'll travel,
You'll meet a lot funny men;
Some will rob you with a six gun
And some with a fountain pen.

That was in the thirties. Nowadays, theives use cruise missiles and computer terminals.