USA and the wheat Cheats

US farmers, who had complained in recent years about the AWB's dealings in Iraq, reportedly could not understand why their representatives could not get meetings with Iraqi officials when AWB's staff were enjoying great access to key people in Baghdad.

In 2000 Canada raised concerns about AWB's Iraq operations with the United Nations, while in 2003, the main American grower group, US Wheat Associates, wrote to the US President, George Bush, and the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, to investigate claims Iraq had paid "exorbitant prices" for Australian wheat while the US was locked out of the market.

Supporting the wheat lobby, a Democrat senator, Patty Murray urged the Bush administration to investigate.

In response, Mr Vaile in June 2003 described the allegations as "quite insulting", while AWB labelled them "ridiculous".
Senator Coleman's committee had a brief to specifically examine the activities of AWB in Iraq, but it has yet to report on AWB's Iraqi operations.

SMH

It is fascinating to see how the US administration will screw their own as quickly as they will screw free trade partners. Even more interesting is that lobby groups like US Wheat Associates will just roll over and take it.
Who knew what, about Australia’s ‘wheat cheats’ and when is bound to become a major embarrassment in the US as well as Australia. Patty Murray might not have had the clout to stand up to the obvious lies and duplicity of the Administration. Coleman, on the other hand, still doggedly pursued British Member of Parliament George Galloway and others.

“Since the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Coleman, began its investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program in early 2004, it has scored some impressive findings. Earlier this summer, the committee presented evidence that French and British government officials had received multimillion-barrel oil allocations from Saddam Hussein's government, as did several Russian politicians and government officials.” Duluth News Tribune

Of course Galloway was anti the Iraq war while the Australian Government could not move quickly enough, on that front, in their efforts to please Bush’s team.
We can only suspect that former Secretary Powell was caught between a rock and a hard place in this saga. He has already made his overall concerns clear, but there are some details from this inquiry which are bound to make him feel uncomfortable.
In the end it is about the lies perpetrated to ‘justify’ a war which should never have happened. The mess left behind goes much further than a dysfunctional post wear Iraq; the fallout undermines any trust in our governing institutions and corporate giants.