Opening arguments are expected today in the trial of Texas oil tycoon Oscar S. Wyatt, charged with conspiracy to pay millions in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein on deals done under the UN Oil-for-Food Program.

But oddly enough, even before the arguments had begun, this case was already playing in the press as one more potential example of Bush administration overkill on Iraq. Wyatt has been contending for some time that he’s been singled out for prosecution due to his criticisms of both Bush administrations, and both wars in Iraq. Last week, while jury selection was underway, articles highlighting this line appeared in The New York Times (”Texas Tycoon, Prosecuted for Iraq Dealings, Says He’s a Target“) and the Wall Street Journal (”Politics Figures in Wyatt Trial“).

That’s a curious line for these titans of the press to pick up on, because the public record shows that in facing Oil-for-Fraud charges, Wyatt is far from alone. To date, in the U.S. alone, eight others have already pleaded guilty or been convicted, and charges are pending against five more. In both articles, this was reduced to a brief mention, low in the story.

So let’s review a few of these cases. Among the guilty are Iraq-born U.S. citizen Samir Vincent, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to receiving Oil-for-Food contracts in exchange for working as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Vincent then testified as a government witness at the jury trial in 2006 of a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who was convicted and received the maximum sentence of five years for conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the government of Iraq in trying to bribe UN officials (none specified) to rig Oil-for-Food from the start. And last month, another Texas Oilman, David Chalmers, plus two of his Bayoil companies, pleaded guilty to conspiring to pay kickbacks to the government of Iraq. A business associate of Chalmers, Bulgarian national Ludmil Dionissiev, pleaded guilty to related smuggling charges.

Among those described by federal prosecutors as fugitives, under indictment in New York, are the former head of the Oil-for-Food program, Cypriot national Benon Sevan (who says he is innocent); and two business associates of Wyatt who worked out of Switzerland.

Oscar Wyatt is entitled to a full presumption of innocence, but one might suppose that is rather a different story angle from the claim of being singled out.

As for the photograph above, released last year — it may play no part in the current case, but perhaps it offers a window on Saddam’s busy social schedule under UN sanctions, and it shows some of the cast of characters. It was introduced as a government exhibit at the trial in 2006 of Tongsun Park, during the testimony of cooperating witness Samir Vincent (it’s a good bet he’ll be testifying at the Wyatt trial as well). It was a souvenir of a trip by Vincent and Wyatt to Iraq, taken in early April, 1995, in Baghdad. According to Vincent, they flew on Wyatt’s private jet from Washington via Geneva to Amman, then drove to Baghdad — where they had a lengthy meeting with Saddam Hussein himself. On the far left is Samir Vincent, next to him is Saddam’s former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, then Oscar Wyatt, and Saddam…. But let us now sit back and wait for the arguments to begin.

We return now to our regularly scheduled UN cover-up, involving the UN Development Program, its top managers Kemal Dervis and Ad Melkert — and their North Korean Cash-for-Kim scandal, their firing of Cash-for-Kim whistleblower Artjon Shkurtaj, their refusal to accept the findings of the UN’s own Ethics Office that Shkurtaj was unjustly fired in retaliation for his whistleblowing, and now… their proposal that the UNDP engage in its own investigation and review of itself.

(Note, this is the flagship UN agency that spends billions every year of public money spreading its ideas of good governance throughout the developing world).

A few members of Congress are still committed to the Herculean labor of cleaning up the UNDP, despite considerable evidence that Dervis, Melkert, and Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon himself could hardly care less about ethics, justice, accountability, and all those good things — as long as they can continue rolling in U.S. tax money. Thursday evening, Senator Coleman tried to address that issue with an amendment (unanimously passed) to a Senate appropriations bill. It would stop the disbursement of U.S. funding to the UNDP until the UNDP adopts a whistleblower protection policy.

And from the House, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen fired off a letter Thursday to Ban about the UNDP’s duplicities, noting that “allowing an entity to define and instigate the sole inquiry into its own alleged wrong-doing is absurd and contrary to all international best practices.” The letter gives a terrific recap of the banana-republic behavior of the UN and UNDP, and the accompanying press release — which goes on to include the text of the letter — provides a handy summary of such UNDP activities as hiding counterfeit U.S. currency for years in its Pyongyang office safe, and reportedly serving as a conduit for deals funneling millions worth of cash and equipment to a North Korean outfit linked to Kim Jong Il’s missile and weapons programs.

Ros-Lehtinen has been corresponding with Ban’s office about whistleblower protection for a while now — with embarrassing results for Ban. In a letter dated July 5, while the UN Ethics Office was still looking into the case of the fired UNDP whistleblower, Shkurtaj, Ros-Lehtinen wrote to Ban asking that he use his authority “to ensure that the whistleblower at issue is not wronged.” On July 16, Ban’s chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, wrote back, saying that the UN Ethics office was working on the case, and “must be free to conduct its work free from any interference from the Secretary-General’s office.”

In other words, back in mid-July, Ban evidently had no problem accepting that the Ethics Office had the authority to decide the case. It was only after the Ethics office ruled in August in favor of Shkurtaj, and the UNDP rejected the decision (and the jurisdiction), that Ban declined to support the finding of his own UN Ethics authorities, and instead agreed limply to the UN’s newfound policy of ethical apartheid — in which some UN staffers are entitled to whistleblower protection, and others aren’t.

At this point, the UN Staff Union has backed the principle of justice for all, and asked for justice for whistleblower Shkurtaj in particular; so has the United Nations International Civil Servants Federation. And this week a letter surfaced from another former UNDP employee, saying he was fired in exchange for whistleblowing, and asking the UN Ethics Office for help.

Which brings us to the UNDP executive board, which by now appears to have defined itself as the entity solely and exclusively in charge of a UNDP that refuses to account to the Secretary-General, to Congress, to the taxpaying public, or to anyone else on the planet. This UNDP executive board is about to meet and start deciding what to do about the expanding muck patch over which it presides — or, as Ros-Lehtinen put it in her latest letter to Ban, these “recent developments” which “have unfortunately broadened what was originally a North Korea program-specific issue into a larger issue of UNDP management and accountability.”

The man who currently chairs the UNDP executive board is Denmark’s ambassador to the UN, Carsten Staur. This is his to-be-or-not-to-be moment. We now wait to see whether this eminent representative of the good people of Denmark, and their democracy, will cast his lot with the likes of Dervis, Melkert, and such UNDP board members as China, Belarus and North Korea. Or will he use his platform to remind them all, and reassure the rest of us, that — despite all the manhandling of whistleblowers — there is still someone at the UN willing to fight for such principles as integrity, justice, and plain old decency? What’s to lose? — one more job?

Maybe, before deliberating, the members of the UNDP executive board should avail themselves of the UN’s lavish audio-visual facilities to enjoy a bit of entertainment. There’s a movie from the 1970s that would be just the ticket. It’s called “Serpico,” starring a young Al Pacino. He plays a rookie cop assigned to work with a nest of corrupt colleagues. They want him to be corrupt too — that way there’s no threat to their cozy set-up. He’s an honest man, who actually believes he has been hired to uphold the public trust. When he refuses to be complicit in the graft, the other cops turn on him. He finds himself an outcast, his life in danger … for rocking their comfortable boat.

Moammar Gadhadi, tyrant of Libya for the past 38 years, has a full diplomatic dance card these days. He has been rehabilitated as one of our pals in the eyes of the UN, the EU and the U.S. State Department. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon plans to visit Libya this weekend, and the whisper is that Condoleezza Rice may be contemplating a trip there this fall. But if the idea is to visit someone who is an ally of the free world, it’s not Moammar Gadhafi they should be calling on. It’s Fathi Eljahmi, locked up in Libya for years now by Gadhafi’s thug regime. More in my column today for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

You remember that UN “anti-racism” conference in September, 2001, in Durban, South Africa? Hijacked by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, it turned into a frenzy of anti-Israel, anti-America activity — elbowed abruptly out of the news about three days later by the like-minded Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Evidently the hijackers of the Durban conference felt they deserved a lot more time in the spotlight, and the UN agrees, because now they are preparing to do it all over again, quite likely on millions worth of your taxpayer UN-dues dollars, in 2009.

This grotesque UN farce has nothing to do with being anti-racist, and everything to do with that staple UN habit of being anti-Israel, anti-American and pro-tyranny — with a special tilt toward the Islamo-fascist-spawning tyrannies of the Middle East. Preparations are already well underway, with Libya presiding, and such pillars of UN “human rights” policy as Cuba, Pakistan and Iran preparing to vet the “anti-racist” measures of other states. Read all about it, in Anne Bayefsky’s Durban Watch reports on the Durban II planning shindig in Geneva.