Speech on Food for Oil Program

In all these matters, for publicly elected officials the key question comes back to that which was posed in the Nixon impeachment hearings of 1974: what did you know and when did you know it? We now find out that the minister’s argument is that he never knew anything. That is not what I would call a great advocacy of ministerial responsibility and success because, as has been detailed on many occasions—and I will go back to some of them—on very many occasions the minister should and, by any credible explanation, must have known.