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A recent piece of news has shed new light on what could be another storm for both the Clintons. Like an old shipwreck, the crashing waves are slowly revealing more from beneath the sand. Recently, we were treated to the revelation that an agent of Saddam Hussein's essentially financed a junket to visit Iraq before the war and complain about the sanctions' effect on the poor Iraqi children. (Let's forget for a moment that it turned out that Saddam was actually engaged in a vast criminal enterprise through the oil-for-food program, and was essentially starving his "poor Iraqi children" for...

Madeleine and her Exes by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 11, 2008 When big-name Democrats return to academia after leaving elective or appointive office, they may go through withdrawals. “I’m starting a group of former foreign ministers called ‘Madeleine and her exes,’” the first woman to serve as U. S. Secretary of State said last Tuesday. Currently, Madeleine K. Albright teaches at Georgetown. “This weekend my class is doing a simulation on Iran,” she said at the seminar co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress. “We were doing North Korea but I got tired of that.” Albright addressed a symposium on...

Accused Saddam Agent Says He Met With Hillary at White House By IRA STOLL, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN | March 27, 2008 A Michigan man facing federal criminal charges of illegally working for Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service says he met with Hillary Clinton at the White House in May 1996. In a 1997 interview with this reporter, Muthanna Hanooti said that at the meeting, Mrs. Clinton was "very receptive" to his request for an easing of the American sanctions on Iraq that were in place at the time. He said Mrs. Clinton "passed a message to the State...

  When a vicious dictator wants a fifth column of Congressmen to run interference, he knows to call the Party of Defeat.  Saddam's Salesmen   By Ben Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, March 27, 2008 “If being used means that we’re highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children, then yes, we don’t mind being used.” – Rep. James McDermott, D-WA, on his 2002 trip to Iraq, financed by Saddam Hussein. We’ve long contended the terrorists could not buy better representation than the Democratic Left gives them for free. We never knew how right we were. The media revealed last...

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors say Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion. An indictment in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam's regime. Prosecutors say Iraqi intelligence officials paid for the trip through an intermediary. In exchange, Al-Hanooti allegedly received 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil. The lawmakers are not mentioned but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and...

Obama's Syrian Connection By Andrew Walden FrontPageMagazine.com | 3/11/2008 Most politicians try to keep their financial backers un-indicted until after the election. But Obama’s biggest early sponsor, dual U.S.-Syrian citizen Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, is already indicted by a federal grand jury. Now he is going to trial in a Chicago federal court. Rezko, along with co-defendants Ali Ata and Abdelhamid Chaib, face federal grand jury charges presented in October 2006 by the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald. The case centers on allegations of fraud between 2000 and 2004 in the sale of 17 Papa Johns’ Pizza parlors in...

Out on bail awaiting trial, dual US-Syrian citizen, Antoin ‘Tony' Rezko, was rousted out of bed by police pounding on the doors of his Chicago mansion the morning of Monday, January 28. According to the Associated Press: "U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve jailed Rezko...saying he had disobeyed her order to keep her posted on his financial status. Among other things, he failed to tell her about a $3.5 million loan from London-based Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi -- a loan that was later forgiven in exchange for shares in a prime slice of Chicago real estate. Rezko gave $700,000...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Texas oilman David Chalmers was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday after admitting to paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to Iraq in connection with the U.N. oil-for-food program. Chalmers, 54, and his two corporations, Bayoil Supply and Trading Ltd. and Bayoil USA Inc., were sentenced in federal court in Manhattan. Chalmers also was ordered to forfeit $9 million dollars. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in August, weeks before he was due to go on trial with Texas oil tycoon Oscar Wyatt. Wyatt was sentenced to a...

Accused Illinois fixer Antoin "Tony" Rezko is in debt by $50 million and relies on "family" handouts of $7,500 a month to pay monthly costs, according to a previously sealed court transcript reviewed by ABC News. Rezko's bleak financial picture raises the question of how the Rezkos were able to buy a vacant lot adjoining the home of Sen. Barack Obama in 2005, at a time Rezko says he was already in deep debt. Rezko also reveals in the testimony, before Judge Amy St. Eve on Jan. 16, 2007, that he already knew he was under federal investigation at the...

UNITED NATIONS - A former Russian top spy says his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000 as a double agent, says he oversaw an operation that helped Saddam's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the program — and allow Russia to skim profits. Tretyakov, former deputy head of intelligence at Russia's U.N. mission from 1995 to 2000, names some names, but sticks mainly to code names. Among the spies...

A third pharmaceutical giant said Sunday it is being investigated by Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) over alleged breaches of the United Nations oil-for-food programme in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Eli Lilly and Company Limited said it had been asked to hand over documents to the SFO, a day after British peer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca announced they had received similar requests.

LONDON, England (AP) -- Britain's Serious Fraud Office has demanded documents from three major drug makers in connection with allegations the companies paid bribes to secure lucrative contracts in Iraq while Saddam Hussein was in power, the companies said. GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly and Co. Ltd. -- the British affiliate of Indianapolis, Indiana-based Eli Lilly and Co. -- are all accused of violating the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, established in the mid-1990s to ease the impact on Iraqis of sanctions imposed on Saddam's regime after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

UNITED NATIONS — The General Assembly is preparing to put an early end to an in-house panel that has exposed more than $600 million in tainted United Nations contracts and is currently investigating an additional $1 billion in suspect agreements. A budget committee of the General Assembly is scheduled to vote as early as Friday on a resolution that would force the panel to close down its operations in six months. The effort to scuttle the panel is not a budget matter so much as a political one, and it represents the continuing suspicion developing countries have about international intervention...

NEW YORK - A Houston oil trader with a minor role in the United Nations' oil-for-food scandal will not go to prison after admitting wrongdoing, a judge said Thursday. Ludmil Dionissiev, 61, pleaded guilty earlier this year to a smuggling charge for helping bring Iraqi oil into the United States in January 2001. In sentencing Dionissiev to two years of probation and ordering him to pay a $5,000 fine, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin called him the "least culpable" of those charged. Before he was sentenced, Dionissiev apologized, saying he knew what he was doing was wrong when he committed...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt, 83, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison on Tuesday for conspiracy in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, becoming the most prominent figure jailed over corruption in the program to buy oil from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The outspoken self-made oil tycoon was sentenced in Manhattan federal court after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in October, four weeks into his criminal trial and just before prosecutors were to rest their case. Under his plea agreement, prosecutors dropped four other counts against him, cutting short a trial in...

Russia's Foreign Ministry said Saturday that it was disappointed with a U.S. court decision to sentence a former Russian diplomat to the U.N. to prison for money laundering and fraud. The ministry said in a statement that it would consider demanding Vladimir Kuznetsov be returned to Russia. The former diplomat, who once chaired the United Nations' powerful budget oversight committee, was sentenced Friday to four years and three months in prison by a U.S. district court after being found guilty in March of laundering money from foreign companies seeking U.N. contracts. He was also ordered to pay a $73,000 (€51,500)...

Several months ago, the Pentagon's network and e-mail system fell victim to computer hacking. After an internal investigation, Pentagon officials declared that the hack was perpetrated by the Chinese military. In particular, officials said the attack "was by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) and that it led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates." Now, a Chinese company with ties to the country's military, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger.According to a story in the Washington Times, Huawei Technologies...

NEW YORK — Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt Jr. pleaded guilty Monday to charges that he paid millions of dollars to Iraqi officials to illegally win contracts connected to the United Nations oil-for-food program. Wyatt told the federal judge in Manhattan that he agreed in December 2001 to advise others to pay a surcharge into an Iraqi account in Jordan in violation of a program rule calling for no direct payments to Iraq. "I didn't want to waste any more time at 83 years old fooling with this operation," Wyatt said outside court. "The quicker I get it over with the...

Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson and a host of congressional candidates from both parties accepted cash from Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. and his wife, Lynn,since the federal government accused the Texas oilman of paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein. Wyatt was indicted in 2005 on charges related to illegal payments for oil contracts from the Hussein-led Iraqi government under the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. And since then, the Wyatts have found willing recipients for nearly $22,000 in political donations. After inquiries from Politico, Richardson and Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said they would donate the Wyatts’ contributions...

Prosecutors promised on Monday to prove that Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's government, earning him a privileged position in Iraq. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Miller told jurors at opening arguments of Wyatt's trial that prosecutors would present photos, audio tapes, bank records, U.N. records and Iraqi government records proving Wyatt paid kickbacks to win Iraqi oil contracts . "Oscar Wyatt's years of assistance to the Hussein regime earned him a privileged status in Iraq," Miller said. Wyatt, an 83-year-old self-made oil tycoon, faces five counts in Manhattan federal court including engaging in...