Thank goodness for Claudia Rosett. She’ll be there this September for the opening of the United Nations–keeping the thugs in charge over there on their toes and explaining to the American public just what their taxes are paying for.
In her latest column, Rosett describes the criminals in charge at the UN.
This September, it’s business as usual that one of Gaddafi’s longtime servants and former foreign ministers, Ali Abdessalam Treki, will take over the 2009-2010 presidency of the entire U.N. General Assembly… [T]he biggest single voting bloc in the General Assembly, the 130 member G-77, is presided over this year by Sudan. Iran sits on a slew of governing boards supervising various agencies, and chairs the governing board of both the U.N.’s New York-based flagship U.N. Development Program, and the U.N.’s Copenhagen-based Office for Project Services, or UNOPS.
Rosett also finds a disturbing trend of apathy toward investigating and punishing criminal activity at the UN. She writes:
A few years ago, the Southern District of New York had a team of prosecutors who pulled in a 100% success rate of convictions and guilty pleas in a series of U.N.-related bribery, money-laundering and fraud cases. That team has moved on. Congress had staffers and even lawmakers who had taken the trouble to learn enough about the U.N. to be appalled, and call for remedies. With a few exceptions, such as Sen. Tom Coburn and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, they are gone. The anti-corruption task force set up at the U.N. itself to delve into procurement corruption has been dissolved.