In the May 5 Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes summarized the story and added that American politicians also received cash: Rep. Jim McDermott, so memorably featured from Baghdad attacking President Bush as a liar last fall on ABC’s This Week, accepted $5,000 for his legal defense fund from Shakir al-Khafaji, a Saddam supporter (and contractor with the Ba’athist regime) who arranged his Baghdad trip.
It doesn't surprise me that McDirty was taking payoff money from Saddam but who are the OTHER American politicians referred to here?
The DC Chapter gave awards for incorrect or wide of the mark statements, but how can you measure the impact of not reporting that which splashes egg on your own face?
This is what they are afraid of!!! Waiting......!!!
The same man who funded Scott Ritter's pro-Saddam propaganda film.
Saddam's Cash
The Weekly Standard ^ | May 5, 2003 | Stephen F. Hayes
Scores of journalists (and NGOs) throughout the Arab world and Europe were on Saddam Hussein's payroll.
...."For years, the Iraqi leader has been waging an intensive, sometimes clandestine, and by most accounts highly effective image war in the Arab world," wrote Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Geraldine Brooks in an exposé published February 15, 1991. "His strategy has ranged from financing friendly publications and columnists as far away as Paris to doling out gifts as big as new Mercedes-Benzes."
....That campaign continued until days before the regime was deposed. "If they're not bought and paid for, they're at least rented," says a top national security official, who adds that the administration has intelligence implicating big-name journalists throughout the Arab world and Europe.
U.N. Officials Admit They Were Powerless to Stop Iraqi Leader's Skimming
By Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz
L O N D O N, May 20— United Nations officials looked the other way as Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed $2 billion to $3 billion in bribes and kickbacks from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program, said U.N. officials who told ABCNEWS they were powerless to stop the massive graft.
THE REAL SCANDAL OF IRAQI RELIEF
New York Post ^ | 5/11/03 | JONATHAN FOREMAN
May 11, 2003 -- BAGHDADTHEY come from all over the world. Their supposed mission is to help the people of Iraq. Their concerned frowns and even their clothes all proclaim the message: "We're the good, caring people . . . and you're not."
But if actions speak louder than words, then many of the international charitable organizations called NGOs (non-governmental organizations) here are less interested in doing good works than in moral posturing and haranguing the army that won a war most of them opposed.
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Mark Steyn: Come on over the water's lovely
The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 06/01/03 | Mark SteynExcerpts:...vast numbers of bureaucrats are running around Iraq with unlimited budgets in search of a human catastrophe that doesn't exist......So that's the most basic thing about post-Saddam Iraq: for all the "anarchy", no one's fleeing....I had an illegally acquired firearm but, even in Tikrit, I was relaxed enough to leave it in the glove box....the Ba'athist buildings, and they're the sole target of highly focused looting. Everything else is untouched - the poky grocery stores piled high with boxes of soda you could boil a lobster in, the ramshackle auto shops with their mounds of second-hand tyres, all these are open for business, and in the end they're more relevant to the future of Iraq than the legions of unemployed Saddamite bureaucrats in Baghdad or the NGO armies in their brand new, gleaming white Chevy Suburbans and Land Rovers cruising the streets touting for business like drug pushers in search of junkies....The winsome young Arab boy with a face as lovely as Halle Berry's and a lot less grumpy brought me a whole roast chicken - stringy but chewy - piled with bread and served with a generous selection of salads. I managed to determine that the Oxfam crowd was holding a meeting with the Red Cross to discuss the deteriorating situation. But just what exactly was "deteriorating"? As my groaning table and the stores along Main Street testified, there was plenty of food in town. Was it the water? I made a point of drinking the stuff everywhere I went in a spirited effort to pick up the dysentery and cholera supposedly running rampant. But I remain a disease-free zone. So what precisely is happening in Rutba that requires an Oxfam/ICRC summit? Well, the problem, as they see it, is that, sure, there's plenty of food available but "the prices are too high". That's why the World Food Programme and the other NGOs need to be brought in, to distribute more rations to more people.
...And perhaps that's why I found rather more hostility towards the WFP, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees et al than towards the military. ... the new imperial class are the NGOs. They shuttle across the globe, mingling with their own kind - other SUV users - and bringing with them the values of the mother country, or the mother bureaucracy. Like many imperialists, they're well-meaning: they see their charges as helpless and dependent, which happy condition has the benefit of justifying an ever-growing aid bureaucracy in perpetuity. It will be very destructive for Iraq if the tentativeness of the American administration in Baghdad allows the ambulance-chasers of the NGOs to sink their fangs into the country.
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The mainstream press continues to investigate...the Administration.
The Senate is investigating....the Administration.