|
|
|
CORRUPTION PLAGUES THE U.N.
By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid
In February the U.S. Senate voted $582 million for the United Nations as part of a deal to pay-off an alleged U.S. financial debt to the world organization. In the House of Representatives, which still has to vote on the deal, many members believe the U.S. owes nothing to the U.N. because of billions of dollars of peacekeeping expenses that haven't been credited or reimbursed to the U.S. Another problem with sending the money is that the Clinton Administration fired our top budget analyst at the U.N., Linda Shenwick, because she was telling Congress about U.N. corruption. Without Shenwick in place, there is still no effective way to monitor where our money is going. Some members of Congress, including Senator Charles Grassley and Congressmen Cliff Stearns and Roscoe Bartlett, have spoken out on Shenwick's behalf, but progress in getting her returned to her job has been slow. She has been out of her job for 18 months. "The United Nations has very, very shoddy management practices," Shenwick told a recent AIM conference on whistleblowers. After going to her superiors with this information, she said, they confirmed it but insisted that she not share it with Congress. Shenwick was told by one official at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. that telling the truth about U.N. mismanagement didn't serve the interests of the Clinton Administration. After receiving a series of outstanding performance evaluations, she got an unsatisfactory evaluation as retaliation for her truth-telling. U.S. officials even tried to move Shenwick to a job in Virginia unrelated to her expertise. She said the U.N. itself Adoesn't want to identify and change the way it does business. This behavior was encouraged by the Clinton Administration. As early as 1995, the administration knew that U.N. troops being sent into Africa and Asia as peacekeepers were spreading AIDS. "They did nothing to deal with that problem," she said. "They only recognized and began talking about the problem one year ago" in early 2000. She said that when then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright briefed her senior team at the mission about the problem, Albright told them, "Don't go out of the room with this." Noting that the U.N. is spending millions of dollars supposedly to fight the AIDS epidemic, Shenwick said one solution might be for the U.N. to stop sending AIDS-infected soldiers around the world. She added that, "Our troops that served with them were put at risk" and that "The United Nations is probably responsible for introducing AIDS into Cambodia." Indeed, a documentary making this claim has been produced by a group in Sweden. Shenwick was eventually locked out of her office, her safe combination changed, telephone lines cut, and told to leave the building under armed guard escort. She said, "Madeleine Albright taught me what I never wanted to learn -- that there was a reason to fear the U.S. Government." Shenwick was told that if she fought the corruption and cover-up, she would be ruined financially and would lose her case. She thanked Judicial Watch, which represents her, for helping her continue to fight this injustice.
|
