Can You Say Coverup?

Opinion Journal today published Claudia Rosett's latest report on the Oil For Fraud scandal and efforts by the United Nations to prevent damaging information about the scandal from seeing daylight.

Rosett writes about a leaked internal audit report (accessible here), one of more than fifty prepared for U.N. review, implicating Cotecna, a Swiss firm, in gross misconduct related to the Oil For Fraud program. Cotecna employed the son of Secretary General Kofi Annan at the time it was awarded a contract, and while the report does not reference Kojo Annan, it does provide detail about the U.N.'s total failure to address contractural and procedural issues that were self evidently "inappropriate."

The report reveals systematic incompetence and mismanagement by the U.N., which if part of a pattern might well be characterized as willful. This leads to the question, what of the other forty-nine internal audit reports? Rosett writes that the reports have been turned over to an internal U.N. audit conducted by Paul Volcker, but that Volcker lacks subpoena power and authority to publish his findings beyond an audience of one- namely Kofi Annan. Can you say coverup?