Panel issues devastating criticism of UN security in Iraq
An independent report on the security lapses before the devastating August 19 attack on the United Nations headquarter in Baghdad, made by a panel headed by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, is a damning indictment of the whole UN chain of command, or lack thereof.
 Louise Fréchette (picture), the Canadian UN deputy secretrary genereal who headed the UN steering group on Iraq, is in for especially hard criticism, failing to even discuss the level of danger before going into the country, and for not setting up a chain of command needed for security.
The report criticises the UN system at every level.
The combined effect of ``a series of individual lapses exposed staff to great risk even without the threat of or attack by a truck bomb,'' the report said. ``A poorly functioning security management team, slow and bureaucratic in coming to decisions, not fully understanding their role and sloppy in its procedures led to inadequate precautions and lack of security discipline.''
``Even though the professional security officers consistently raised other threats there was no real sense of urgency to deal with them. The security staff was not prepared for any major serious incident, there was no security plan and due to the lack of cooperation by (U.N.) agencies, staff numbers and locations were not known,'' the investigators said.
One concrete issue that now infuriates the UN staff the is lack of security film over the windows.
the report that did emerge gives several examples of bad decision-making. The most egregious, in the opinion of many staffers, is the failure by UN management to place anti-blast film over the windows.
The film, which cuts down on fragmentation of glass in an explosion, was offered by the UN's World Food Program, but management rejected the offer, saying the contract to purchase the film had already been put out to tender.
One startled UN worker said: "How can you get a better price than nothing, which is what the World Food Program was proposing."
Hua Jiang, Mr. Annan's deputy spokeswoman, admitted last week that "most of" the 150 people injured in the blast suffered wounds caused by flying glass.
The United Nations bureaucracy, however, does not believe in accountability. The security review that the organisation now will oversee is to be headed by debuty chief Louise Fréchette, the one mainly responsible for the disastrous security lapses to begin with.
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