Claudia Rosett has a revealing new piece up on the Fox News site. Jean-Bernard Merimee, implicated in Saddam’s illicit oil deals, is usually referred to as a “former French ambassador.” But, as Claudia explains, Merimee was more than that. At the height of Oil-for-Food, from 1999-2002, overlapping with the dates he is alleged to have had business with Saddam, he was no longer French ambassador to the UN. He was a hand-picked personal adviser to Kofi Annan.
Merimee is now under investigation in France, and on the U.N. secretary general’s website, his name just went down the memory hole. For more, see here.