Posted on 03/27/2008 11:51:12 AM PDT by NavyCanDo
WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers — possibly including Rep. Jim McDermott — during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.
Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam's regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil.
The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. McDermott of Seattle, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators "have no information whatsoever" any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
McDermott & those like him gave Saddam the false impression he could bribe and talk his way out of the UN Resolutions. If we had presented a united front against Saddam he would have folded and relented to the 17 UN resolutions he was in violation of.
McDermott and those like him are directly responsible for this war.
Useful Idiot alert. Bwahahahaha. McDermott is such a maroon.
I find it odd that the Department of Justice would go to extreme to say the words "have no information whatsoever" when announcing an indictment being handed down. It's still an ongoing 'gatheriung of facts' investigation, but, enough so far to nab at least one.
This Justice Department under Bush has absolutely STUNK over 7 years.
Excellent point.
Would it make a difference to the idiots who voted him in if he WAS aware that sadaam had financed his trip?
If they didn’t, they should have.
Dealing with Iraq should have been a piece of cake, but instead those who oppose it, on purely political grounds, have used it as a springboard for damaging their opponents.
I can't spend a lot of time considering how others will fare when they must stand before their Creator, and make no mistake that time will come, to give an accounting of their lives. I have way too much to worry about in my own life to have the luxury of worrying about others, but I am confident their treason will not go unmentioned or unpunished.
We could have been in and out of Iraq in six months, maybe not even have had to go at all, if they would have been willing to forgo their selfish ways and provide a united front to Saddam.
He would have won re-election by a higher percentage?
Here’s hoping this blows him away.
Doesn’t the state dept get involved with US Congress members when they travel overseas, especially to war zones? I would think that someone must have known or was at least curious about this trip and how it was financed.
well the DOJ has a small problem. The trip was approved by the State Dept
THERE IS NOT AN ANTIAMERICAN DICTATOR WITH WHOM MCDERMOTT DIDN’T FEEL IN COMPLETE SOLIDARITY. FURTHERMORE, HE WILL DO IT FOR FREE
CASTRO’S COCKROACHES
by Agustín Blázquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton
On December 14, 1999, Granma, the official Castro regime newspaper published an interview with Castro. In it, referring to the Elián González’s affair Castro said that the struggle would be “a battle of national and world opinion and that the battle will not cease until that child returns.” Making an obvious reference to his extensive U.S. support network, he said, “there are important sectors in the United States that want the child returned. So when we protest and denounce to the world what is happening and unleash a battle, we are unleashing a battle for those persons within the United States.”
Castro’s statement exposes that there are many high-profile Americans that are members of his support network. Looking at the backgrounds and past actions of some of them in relation to the totalitarian regime in Havana, their membership is clear. For example, Rep. José Serrano (D-NY), who courted the Cuban American votes in 1992 campaigning against Castro to later become an apologist and an advocate for his regime, actively lobbied for the return of Elián González. What accounts for this change of position? Does Castro know something about Serrano and other American politicians and members of the U.S. media that accounts for their behavior supporting his tyrannical ways?
According to official U.S. sources and academic studies, the former Soviet Union-built Lourdes espionage station near Havana poses a threat to the U.S. Introduced in the House of Representatives on March 29, 2000, the Russian-American Trust and Cooperation Act of 2000 (H.R.4118) Section 2. Findings, paragraph (8) states: this facility “is being used to collect personal information about U.S. citizens in private and government sectors, and offers the means to engage in cyberwarfare against the United States.” Is this facility providing Castro blackmail material on U.S. politicians, influential citizens and news media people?
If Serrano and other Americans have any doubt to whom Elián belongs, they just have to read the Cuban Communist Constitution and listen to Luis Fernández, a “diplomat” at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. who said, “He [Elián] is a possession of the Cuban government. No other entity can remove this.” According to J. Michael Waller and Jamie Dettmer of the Insight Magazine, Fernández was identified as one of the attackers of the group of peaceful demonstrators outside the Cuban “diplomatic” section last April 14 in Washington DC.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the U.S. It is affiliated with the Socialist International. Fifty-four U.S. Congressmen are members of the DSA. Coincidentally (?), 34 of these “socialists” are among the most militant members of the pro-Castro lobby. To name just a few, on Capitol Hill we find in the pro-Castro gang Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC-AL), Jesse Jackson (D-IL), Julian C. Dixon (D-CA), James A. McDermott (D-WA), Charles Rangel (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA), etc.
All of them have been faithfully executing the orders of their tyrant-in-chief “unleashing a battle for” Elián’s return to Castro. They are the dependable, fanatical and vociferous taxpayer-paid pro-Castro crowd on Capitol Hill. Many of them have participated in press conferences and interviews promoting the tyrant’s crusade. By their actions they have condemned an innocent 6-year-old child to a life of abuse in the hands of Castro’s infamous psychiatric re-education facilities to eradicate from him the taste of freedom he experienced before being illegally kidnapped under false pretences by Clinton-Reno’s Gestapo-like troops to ultimately being sent back to Cuba.
Washington’s James McDermott, is a fanatical supporter of Castro and the infamous Venceremos Brigades which in the 60s and 70s brought thousands of American students to Cuba under the guise of cutting sugar cane. But these Americans students also received indoctrination so that in the future (we are now seeing the results) they would help the Castro regime’s campaign in the U.S. to favor his goals and serve as access to economic, political and military intelligence. These Venceremos Brigade graduates have effectively infiltrated the foundations of our society. There are unconfirmed rumors that Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 70s was a Venceremos Brigade graduate. If that is true, we have at least one of them very close to the president.
New York’s Charles Rangel’s love affair with Castro dates back to 1959, when Castro stayed at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa and Rangel sat beside him at the dinner table. Ever since he has been the useful servant and he travels to Cuba often bringing members of the U.S. Congress’ Black Caucus and TransAfrica to marvel at the socialist “paradise,” that his friend, Castro - probably the biggest slave master in the history of slavery - has created in Cuba.
Apparently Rangel and company couldn’t care less about the reigning apartheid in Cuba and that their black Cuban brothers are, at 80%, overpopulating Castro’s jails and labor camps and they are hardly in important positions in that socialist utopia. I do not have any recollection of Rangel and company protesting the gross institutional violations of human rights in Cuba, including against the many black pro-democracy activists and independent journalists in Cuba. Rangel and company, in their constant meddling in Cuban affairs and actions of support for the Castro regime, in their myopic view, do not want to meet any of the black political prisoners and harassed activists inside Cuba.
Another faithful servant of slave master Castro is California’s Representative Maxine Waters who has worked actively on his behalf in detriment of the most famous innocent 6-year old in the world. Rep. Waters travels to Cuba often, apparently for guidance or orders from her socialist comrades. She recently was in Havana cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony of a Medical Convention with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA).
Waters is siding with Fidel, because she apparently is repaying his favor of hiding for her a former Black Panther convicted of murder in the U.S. On September 29, 1998, Rep. Waters wrote a “Dear President Castro” letter saying, “I, and some of the Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, mistakenly voted for House Concurrent Resolution 254 which called on the Government of Cuba to extradite to the United States Joanne Chesimard and all other individuals who have fled the United States from political persecution [!] and received political asylum in Cuba. Joanne Chesimard was the birth name of a political activist known to most Members of the Congressional Black Caucus as Assata Shakur.”
Chesimard, AKA, Shakur, a militant member of the Black Panthers was not politically prosecuted in the U.S., rather she was a convicted killer of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster, who was murdered execution-style in a turnpike shootout in 1973. She also wounded his partner. She was not a civil rights leader but a convicted murderer and one of New Jersey’s 12 most wanted fugitives widely sought by various government and law enforcement agencies. She escaped from prison in 1979 and surfaced in Cuba in the 1980s where she has been living since. In her September 1998 letter Rep. Waters encouraged Castro not to extradite her and the other criminals hiding from U.S. justice in Cuba. That speaks volumes about a member of Congress!
Also among the crowd of influential and puzzling Americans that have worked so hard to push Castro’s agenda in the U.S. we have Senator Christopher Dodd, who on May 11, 1999 was heavily criticized in an article written by Angel Pablo Polanco. As an independent journalist living in Cuba, Polanco says, “Senator Dodd is not interested in the reality of the Cuban people, he is interested only in business.” He and his followers show “disloyalty to the principles of freedom.”
The now jailed black human rights activist Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet expressed “consternation” for the statements made by Dodd in relation to the lifting of the U.S. embargo published on April 27, 1999 in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald. A document released by the Lawton Human Rights Foundation in Cuba, founded by Dr. Bicet, says, “The communist system is the source and cause of the Cubans’ hardship. The people suffer under the communist boot. Communism is the new slavery. The lifting of the embargo must be conditioned to the respect of the human rights, freedom of all political prisoners, a multi-party system and free elections, this is a matter of principles not business.”
But, apparently, principles are lacking from Castro’s U.S. fan club. As we see, the above-mentioned and others unmentioned (including the National Council of Churches, Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the United Methodist Church, Pastors for Peace, Randall Robinson, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Ramsey Clark, Jane Fonda, Greg Craig and many prominent members of the media like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Katie Couric, Bryant Gumble, Gerardo Rivera, Ted Turner, Lucia Newman, etc.) reveal by their actions their part in the infestation of Castro’s cockroaches.
Like I said—the idiots who keep voting these creeps into office don’t have a brain among ‘em.
From today’s Seattle Times
Did Iraq’s spy unit pay for McDermott’s trip?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004309211_jim27.html
1. The State Department is full of moles. It is inherently liberal, regardless of who is President or SOS.
2. The trip was supposed to check on the welfare of Iraq children - not be used as anti-American propaganda, referring you back to #1.
"Possibly"? So who went to Baghdad, Jihad Jim's stunt double?! [/Moronic journalist alert].
McDermott and those like him are directly responsible for this war.
Muthanna Al-Hanooti with First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1996.
(Taken from the International Relief Monitor Newsletter.)
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