Oil For Food Investigation Dragging Along Nicely

Josh Marshall has a nice piece on Judith Miller's article on Paul Volcker's investigation of the Oil For Food scandal.

From Miller's piece...

Mr. Volcker said his panel had not yet received the original list of oil vouchers supposedly awarded to diplomats and United Nations officials, which was published by an Iraqi newspaper several months ago. Nor had he determined how his panel would vet such documents to see if they were forgeries, he said.

Yes, you read that correctly. They haven't received the original list of oil vouchers. They've got 15 million pages of documents, but not the most important document of all. Meanwhile, the list published by the Iraqi newspaper has been circulating around the Internet for months now. Considering Volcker will probably never get a credible list (considering pretty much the only places he can get it would be from the Iraqi paper or from our in-hiding friend Ahmed Chalabi) and has no way of determining whether what he does get is credible or not, where the hell can we expect this investigation to go?

Wonderful. The program was supposed to help get the Iraqi people the food and medicine they needed. Instead, powerful politicians (including Saddam Hussein and his political allies) lined their pockets with billions of dollars and will probably never be brought to justice.