The Boston Phoenix drops some innnnteresting info on the oil for food scandal now making anti-UN folks so excited.

To be clear, as noted a couple days ago, Kofi Annan has said “my bad” on this scandal. This is just for perspective:

…Hussein smuggled $6 billion worth of oil out of Iraq — most of it through the Persian Gulf. Yet the UN fleet charged with intercepting any such smugglers was under direct command of American officers, and consisted overwhelmingly of US Navy ships. Most of the oil that left Iraq by land did so through Jordan and Turkey — with the approval of the United States. The first Bush administration informally exempted Jordan from the ban on purchasing Iraqi oil — an arrangement that provided Hussein with $4.4 billion over 10 years, according to the CIA’s own findings.

Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the first six years of economic sanctions against the country, unearthed yet another scam: The United States allegedly allowed an oil company run by Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov’s sister to purchase cheap oil from Iraq and resell it to US companies at market value — purportedly earning Hussein “hundreds of millions” more.

“It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under ‘oil for food’ ended up in the United States,” Ritter wrote in the UK Independent.

Thanks to bookninja for pointing to this story—which discusses ten of the biggest news items you might not have heard over the last year. Good reading.