The article is looooong but informative. Tucked in toward the end was this about the McDermott/Bonior trip in 2002:
Of course, no one can say what the congressmen's motives were for their trip. But judging from a press release the trio issued before they left, on September 25,
Then the check to McDermott, according to the excerpt in my previous post, is received one month later. In fact, Here's the full part on the congressmen:
Al-Khafaji told Baghdad Radio on June 14, 2000, that he hoped to arrange a delegation so that members of the U.S. Congress could "get acquainted with the Iraqi people's suffering as a result of the unjust embargo clamped on it." He got his wish two years later, when he accompanied Reps. Jim McDermott, Jim Thompson, and David Bonior to Baghdad last fall.
McDermott, in particular, caused quite a fuss when in a September 29 appearance on ABC's "This Week" from Baghdad, he claimed, "The president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war." Moments later, despite 12 years of evidence that the Iraqi regime had lied about its weapons program, McDermott said, "I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face value."
(My comment on following: In the above article it explains that "Babil" was the Iraq newspaper run by Uday Hussein):
The same day, Babil ran a brief item in its local news section. "Saddam Hussein received cable of support from Shakir al-Khafaji, president of the 17th Iraqi Expatriate Conference, on behalf of Iraqis who are living abroad."
The members of Congress returned to the United States facing intense criticism, and quickly sought to reassure an angry public that the objective of their mission was, in Bonior's words, "to impress upon the Iraqi government and the people of Iraq how important it was for them to allow unconditional, unfettered, unrestricted access to the inspectors." He reiterated the point at an October 2 press conference, telling reporters, "The purpose of our trip was to make it very clear, as I said in my opening statement, to the officials in Iraq how serious we--the United States is about going to war and that they will have war unless these inspections are allowed to go unconditionally and unfettered and open. And that was our point."
Of course, no one can say what the congressmen's motives were for their trip. But judging from a press release the trio issued before they left, on September 25, it's clear it wasn't to secure unfettered inspections. Although the congressmen warned about the "dangerous implications of a unilateral, preemptive strike," they didn't mention inspections once.
On October 25, McDermott received a check for $5,000 from Shakir al-Khafaji. The money, first reported by Amy Keller in Roll Call, had been deposited in an account for the McDermott Legal Expense Trust, a fund the congressman set up to pay legal bills in a lawsuit brought against him by Rep. John Boehner. (In 1996, McDermott had released to the media the transcript of a phone conversation between Boehner and Newt Gingrich, taped by a Florida couple.)
No one has accused McDermott of being a mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein simply for financial reasons. Indeed, McDermott has been saying stupid things for years with no evidence anyone has paid him to do so. A spokesman for McDermott says he "doesn't know off the top of [his] head" whether McDermott has plans to return the money.