Claudia Rosett Wins Breindel Award

Claudia Rosett Wins Breindel Award

FDD Journalist-in-Residence Honored for Exposing UN Oil-for-Food Scandal

WASHINGTON, DC (June 2, 2005) – The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies congratulates FDD Journalist-in-Residence Claudia Rosett, for receiving the seventh annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism for her groundbreaking work exposing the UN Oil-for-Food scandal.

“For more than two years, Claudia Rosett has dug through the documents and sifted through the corruption to bring the world the truth about the UN’s Oil for Food program,” said FDD President Clifford May.  “Without Claudia’s dogged reporting, much of what we know now about the program – which was meant to feed Iraqis, but was instead used to build palaces and buy weapons – would not be known.  I am both pleased and proud that FDD was able to give Claudia the support to do this work.”

Since September, 2004, Ms. Rosett has published more than 40 articles examining different aspects of the Oil-for-Food scandal.  Her work has raised many important – and still to be answered — questions about the program. Among them:  What was the role of Secretary General Kofi Anan? Did lucrative Oil-for-Food contracts influence France and Russian’s position on the need for military action in Iraq? Were Oil-for-Food funds directed to terrorists?

Rosett has been invited to testify numerous times before Congress. She appears regularly in national and international media to discuss her work.

In selecting Rosett for the 2005 Breindel Journalism Award, Deputy Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation Lachlan Murdoch noted, “the full story [of the U.N.-Iraq scandal] is not yet known — in part because Claudia has not finished writing it.”

Five of Ms. Rosett’s articles were submitted for consideration:

“Turtle Bay’s Carnival of Corruption: Digging Deeper into the Scandalous Oil-for-Food Program,” National Review Online, March 21, 2004.

”Oil-for-Terror,” The Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2004.

”The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It?” Commentary Magazine, May 2004.

“U.N. Lesson: Follow the Oil-for-Food Money,” FoxNews.com, June 30, 2004.

”Annan’s Son Took Payments through 2004,” New York Sun, Nov. 26.

The Breindel Award was established in 1998 to recognize “the columnist, editorialist or reporter whose work best reflects the spirit of writings by Eric Breindel:  Love of country and its democratic institutions as well as the act of bearing witness to the evils of totalitarianism.”