No sooner had the Volcker Commission’s first interim report hit the wires than the secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, had his new chief of staff start belittling the findings that will astound and appall not only ordinary Americans but also members of the United States Congress that underwrites a quarter of the United Nations budget. One would have thought that the United Nations’ brass would have taken the hint when Mr. Volcker, a day ahead of the release of his report, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to warn that his findings “do not make for pleasant reading.” But no, Mr. Volcker’s report was still clacking over the news wires when Mr. Annan’s staff chief, Mark Malloch Brown, pronounced, as our Benny Avni reports on page 1 this morning, that a fair reading of the report would show that it is “a critique of the politicization of decision making in this institution” by member states, including America, rather than of the U.N.’s management.

What it sounded like to us is that Mr. Volcker has concluded that the United Nations official who ran the program, Benon Sevan, failed to operate with integrity. When someone like Paul Volcker makes that kind of report, even on an interim basis, it’s going to strike a lot of members of Congress, and others, that the person in question ought to step aside, at the very least. Mr. Volcker also made it clear that the stench of the oil-for-food scandal also extends to the tenure of the previous secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He also pointedly marked his intention to pursue the question of the secretary general’s own integrity and that of his son, Kojo, in the matter of his son’s consulting for Cotecna. The chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Henry Hyde of Illinois, who heads one of several congressional oil-for-food investigations, said in a statement, “I am reluctant to conclude that the U.N. is damaged beyond repair, but these revelations certainly point in this direction.”

One would think that in the face of signals like this the United Nations brass would show at least some humility. But the lawyer for Mr. Sevan not only issued a new denial yesterday but went on to attack the integrity of Mr. Volcker’s committee, saying it was “unfortunate” that the Volcker committee “has succumbed to massive political pressure and now seemed to scapegoat” Mr. Sevan. Mr. Malloch Brown made an effort to point the finger at the member states, a move that struck a number of observers as inapt. Mr. Malloch Brown was alluding to the responsibility of members of the Security Council, through what was known as the 661 Committee, which supervised the oil for food program. It strikes us that Mr. Volcker was trying to head off that dodge in advance. The Volcker report mentioned “politicization” of the program, but said: “Although the Security Council and its 661 Committee exercised combined supervisory and operational oversight, the secretariat and the U.N. administered its day to day operation.”

For all this there was also something of a comic element to the reaction of the United Nations leadership and friends, which could be detected in Mr. Avni’s dispatch. According to Mr. Malloch Brown, the secretary-general was “shocked” by the accusations. And Mr. Annan’s friend, Thomas Lantos, a Democrat of California, put out a statement saying that he was “disgusted and stunned” to learn that Mr. Sevan “could have so crassly violated the trust that the international community placed in him in the service of his own personal greed.” Mr. Malloch Brown, our Mr. Avni also reported, said that he was “dismayed that a friend for so many years is standing accused of breaching the sort of U.N. code of conduct and staff rules” in a manner which “appears to be proven in the report.” Yet he asserted that Mr. Sevan’s transgressions were not enough to waive the immunity from prosecution that all U.N. employees enjoy. Luckily other figures – and time – will have the final word about that.