That hush around the UN yesterday morning was the press presumably speed-reading at the rate of about 175-pages per hour the 353-page UNDP-commissioned, UNDP-presented report reviewing the UNDP program for North Korea, which was shuttered last year after it made headlines with the Cash-for-Kim scandal (Kim, as in Kim Jong Il). Having given the press all of about two hours to absorb and digest the entire contents — in which the worst news, per UN tradition, was somehow buried deep in the report — the head of the UNDP, Kemal Dervis, appeared at 11 A.M. Monday at the UN briefing podium to handle questions, or dictate headlines, or however one cares to describe it.Shouldn’t the investigators themselves have presented the report and taken questions? Nope. This is the UN. The trio who led the investigation, explained Dervis, prefer not to answer questions until the report has been presented to the UNDP Executive Board, due to meet later this month, not in NY (where the UNDP has its headquarters), but in Geneva.
I’m still reading, with a growing sense of deja-oil-for-food-coverup. For a handy summary so far, here’s an editorial on Cash for Kim, Revisited, from today’s Wall Street Journal. More to come.
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