UNITED NATIONS, Dec 14: The US State Department will come under scrutiny in Congress next year for its role in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal , Democratic Representative Tom Lantos said on Monday.

Mr Lantos, of California, who came to the United Nations to give U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan his support, said he was determined US failures, mistakes and decisions should be exposed.

But he said that would not exonerate U.N. officials who administered the defunct 64 billion dollar program. "The US State Department bears some of the responsibility for its failure to prevent and call attention to abuses," Mr Lantos told reporters.

"But I don't think it is realistic at all to assume that the U.N. is innocent in respect to this whole series of shady, questionable and illicit activities." Lantos said Annan was a man of integrity, more than capable of any cleanup needed after a report next year by Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, chosen by the United Nations to investigate the program.

"I am here to express my support for the secretary general," he said. The Bush administration expressed confidence last week in Mr Annan after pointedly avoiding a statement of support when congressional hard liners called for his resignation over corruption in the oil-for-food program.

At least six committees in the Republican-led Congress are looking into the program, including the House International Relations Committee on which Lantos is the ranking Democrat. He said hearings would begin early in 2005.

Under the oil-for-food program, which began in December 1996 and ended in November 2003, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government was allowed to sell oil to buy civilian goods in order to ease the impact of 1990 sanctions on ordinary Iraqis.

The most authoritative published report so far on smuggling and kickbacks by Saddam came from Charles Duelfer, the postwar weapons inspector for the CIA. Duelfer said nearly eight billion dollars of the estimated 10.7 billion dollars in illicit funds came from oil smuggling outside the program, with Jordan and Turkey and especially Syria.

The United States, as part of a Security Council committee supervising oil contracts, allowed the Jordanian and Turkish trade, whose economies would be ruined otherwise, and was unable to stop the smuggling to Syria.

Lantos called the investigation "a very complex one and there is plenty of blame to go around." He met Annan through the secretary-general's wife, Nane, a decade before Annan was first elected in 1997.

Nane Annan is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi destruction near the end of World War Two. Among them were Lantos, then 15, and his future wife, Annette. -Reuters