Uh, about that 762 million..

TheAge

The furor is currently centered on what Joe Wilson didn't find in Africa, but a year after his trip and shortly after our subsequent military overthrow of Saddam, this was a minor story for a news cycle or two:

In April 2003, American troops liberating Iraq found $762 million in American cash in hideouts belonging to Saddam Hussein. American investigators traced the banknotes to UBS and the Extended Custodial Inventory Program. The program, run by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in cooperation with international banks, allowed clients to exchange old banknotes for new ones. One condition of the program was that American currency neither be distributed to nor accepted from nations against which America maintains economic sanctions.

UBS is a Swiss Bank, by the way. They paid a 100 million dollar fine for allowing terrorist states to participate in the program, but have denied laundering charges.

One has to wonder whether Saddam was taking advantage of the program to wash his Oil for Food proceeds? Claudia Rosett has been the go-to journalist about that international graft fair, sanctioned by the UN and run from their headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland:

That's fascinating, not least given the ties of Annan's own son, Kojo Annan, to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil-for-food supplies into Iraq.

Speaking of the OFFP, CIA agents and Africa, Joe Wilson told us what he didn't find there, but did he tell us everything?

There are more questions than answers for the moment, but yellowcake uramium is not only of strategic importance for WMD puposes, it is also a highly profitable commodity traded under UN supervision and restrictions, a set of circumstances known to produce extraordinary opportunities for both profit and corruption, as in Oil—for—Food.

That brings us back to Rosett:

Another 762 contracts set aside indefinitely by the U.N., post-Saddam because of their "questionable utility" were deals for goods that sound handy and humanitarian enough on the generic U.N. face of it.

But they weren't. The UN had to scramble to clean them up before transferring everything to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

I don't pretend to know whether all these elements are connected and am not suggesting the above named persons have committed any crimes. It's just a weird coincidence, like the number 762, which came up in the Rosett story as well, just a prudent reminder to not lose focus on numbers in the War on Terror, specifically the ones printed on the front of currency.