Hussein Used Oil to Dilute Sanctions (washingtonpost.com)

The Washington Post requires a log in account to view the articles so I have excerpted parts:

"Several American companies on the list, compiled from 13 documents kept by Hussein's vice president and oil minister, were given vouchers to purchase billions of dollars of oil at discounted prices. The U.S. companies are not named in the report because of privacy laws, U.S. officials said."

And:

Hussein survived the most comprehensive embargo ever imposed by subverting the very U.N. program introduced in 1996 to help the Iraqi people survive it. Hussein's government made an estimated $1.7 billion between 1996 and 2003 by shrewdly but secretly manipulating the U.N. oil-for-food program, the report says.

The humanitarian program was backed by the United States as a means of controlling Hussein's oil revenue, which had to be channeled through the United Nations. The world body then had to approve the spending of profits on basic necessities for the Iraqi people. But the former Iraqi leader ordered his regime to come up with an array of plans to sell oil under the table so he could spend the money as he saw fit.

The number of countries and companies involved in the schemes to undermine or challenge U.N. sanctions increased dramatically from the time the oil-for-food program was introduced until Hussein's removal from power last year, the report added.

The Duelfer report concludes that Baghdad exploited the program "to give individuals and countries an economic stake in ending sanctions." Hussein introduced a system of rewards for illegally dealing with Baghdad, while also playing on international sympathy and "successfully arguing its case that the sanctions were harming the innocent."

The success of Hussein's regime in circumventing the U.N. embargo is "grossly obvious," the report says. "It is also grossly obvious how the sanctions perverted not just the [Iraqi] national system of finance and economics, but to some extent the international markets and organizations."

The Bush administration sought yesterday to highlight this aspect of the Duelfer report to counter the finding that Hussein probably had produced no new weapons of mass destruction since 1991, after the U.S.-led coalition forced Iraq to retreat from Kuwait.