All-Star Panel: Investigation into UN shipments to rogue states

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Investigation into UN shipments to rogue states

All-Star panel weighs in

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," July 5, 2012. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TERESA STANEK REA, U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE: It's an outrage.  Really, it's an outrage that WIPO would be transferring material, violating the sanctions that we have to North Korea and Iran. And this stuff, I mean it's basically, it's funded by U.S. inventors.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The leadership that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was disappointed when they got, to say the least, that information.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN ROBERTS, ANCHOR: That was a recent House judiciary hearing in which they were discussing the transfer of computer equipment, including American servers built by Hewlett-Packard, to North Korea, and Iran. It was a U.N. office, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), that was responsible.

Let me throw out a jump ball here. You look at this and you can't help think what is going at the United Nations.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Business as usual. This is an insane proposition what happened. Here is a U.N. agency working against itself, giving this stuff to rogue states. We're not sure why – either negligence, stupidity, perhaps malice. But that is how the U.N. runs entirely, either negligence or stupidity or malice.

Look at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Who sat on it? Qaddafi's Libya sat on it. Saudi Arabia today sits on it. You can't have a church or a synagogue or bible in Saudi Arabia. It sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council. And where does the money come from for WIPO, for the U.N., for everything? A fifth of is it American. Overwhelmingly all the money is from the industrialized west.

We are subsidizing an entire structure with many, with a legion of organizations, all of whom are either negligent, stupid, or malicious, and who issue resolution, publications, committees, which are almost exclusively anti-western, anti-American, anti-Semitic. It's the center of that thinking in the world.

And why we subsidize it, why we stay in it is beside me. I wrote a quarter a century ago that we should leave, take our money, and take it out of New York so it meets, I don't know in Kinshasa somewhere. We'll see how many diplomats will show up in Kinshasa.

(CROSSTALK)

KRAUTHAMMER: It becomes irrelevant and it withers away.

ROBERTS: Let's take a moment to add a couple of quotes to that. Here is something that John Bolton said about this back in the 1990's. He said, quote, "The [U.N.] Secretariat building in New York is 38 stories. If it lost 10 stories it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

MARY KATHARINE HAM, THE DAILY CALLER: There wouldn't enough for Charles he wants all the –

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTS: I got one more. Mike Huckabee said in 2009 "It's time to get a jackhammer and to simply chip that part of New York City. Let it float into the East River never to be seen again."

KRAUTHAMMER: If it lost 10 stories it would be improved.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: You can see this is a great opportunity to have reminded conservatives how they feel about the U.N.

(CROSSTALK)

HAM: It's shocking how unshocking it is.

ROBERTS: Is it in need of an overhaul? Or is it in need of tearing down and rebuilding?

LIASSON: I thought the U.N. recently got an overhaul. But the question is, I want to know how this happened and why? Was it just they didn't know about their own rules or some rogue shipping clerk?

ROBERTS: How do you miss the part that says there is an embargo against North Korea and Iran so don't ship them computer equipment.

HAM: Well, there seems to be some evidence as well that they went through channels that would be less detectable, which leads to the conclusion perhaps it was malicious rather than just stupid. But this sort of is business as usual as Charles said. They made Robert Mugabe a U.N. tourism ambassador several weeks ago. I mean, this is the way that they think up there -- it's amazing.

ROBERTS: Where is ultimately though, the disconnect here? Does it lie with the United Nations or does it lie with the State Department which is supposed to be keeping an eye on things?

KRAUTHAMMER: I think it lies in the U.N. It's inherently a corrupt organization because it's a sandbox of dictators. It began as something essentially run by the western democracies and it ran somewhat efficiently the first decade or so. And then you had decolonization. You ended up with 100-150 countries, very few of whom are democratic. It is a playpen of dictators. And they run it that way. And the idea that they would use it for anything other than to promote authoritarianism and to attack the west is a fiction. It will always be this way because it's a universal organization.  The alternative is to form a league of democracies as an alternative which over a generation or two would take over the functions and the stature of the U.N.

ROBERTS: So when do we start rebuilding?

LIASSON: I don't know. That's not part of Mitt Romney's platform.

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, then he should be listening.

(LAUGHTER)

HAM: I'm sure John Bolton is. He could probably get involved.

ROBERTS: But ultimately, if you are transferring this high-tech technology, which you give it to Iran and North Korea, you know that it's probably going to be used for something other than its intended purpose, if it's just crunching numbers. What do you do? You can't get it back. This has stumped the panel --

HAM: HP, for instance, has a specific rule within its company that its stuff does not go to these countries. So the corporate -- the corporate folks --

(CROSSTALK)

HAM: The corporate folks that are friends who are generally U.N. supporters might believe would be nefarious are being far less nefarious than the U.N. in this case. But it's hard to keep that stuff out of there.

ROBERTS: One thing you indicated, Charles, the U.N. never ceases to surprise. Thanks for joining us today, folks. Appreciate it. That is it for panel, but stay tuned to see how the campaigns are reaching out to the youth vote. We'll be right back.

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