Posted on 03/27/2008 6:27:27 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
When a vicious dictator wants a fifth column of Congressmen to run interference, he knows to call the Party of Defeat.
| Saddam's Salesmen |
“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 night that Saddam Hussein personally funded the trip of three Democratic Congressmen to Iraq on the eve of the war that led to his ouster. Saddam’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) reportedly bribed an American Muslim activist with two million barrels of oil to arrange the fall 2002 trip for left-wing Congressmen Jim McDermott, D-WA; David Bonior, D-MI; and Mike Thompson, D-CA.
David Horowitz and I thoroughly chronicled the event in our new book, Party of Defeat. On September 29, 2002, the ignominious trio appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, via satellite hookup from foreign soil, to extol the truthfulness of Saddam Hussein, decry the already weakened sanctions imposed by the United Nations, and call President Bush a liar bent on war. David Bonior – who long served as House Democratic Whip, the second-highest ranking post in the House of Representatives – laid the blame squarely on the United States of America. Bonior denounced the regimen of multilateral sanctions, already weakened by the Oil for Food program, as “barbaric” and “horrific.” He backed this up with anecdotal evidence gleaned from the group’s well-supervised tour of Iraqi hospitals. Worse, the U.S. had been “trying to push and dictate” Iraq, namely by requiring its dictator verify his compliance with the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War and the 17 UN resolutions he was currently defying. Although Saddam Hussein had frustrated all previous weapons inspections, Bonior blithely announced that he would now allow inspectors the “unrestricted” autonomy “to look anywhere.” (Of course, the inspectors’ job was not to play hide-and-seek with Iraq’s prewar WMD cache; it was to verify that he had destroyed all WMDs, as he had agreed to do as a precondition of peace in 1991.) Rep. James McDermott echoed that none of the arms imbroglio was the Iraqi regime’s fault, anyway, as “Iraq did not drive the inspectors out; we took them out.” Again, the United States was blaming the victim and punishing innocent children for her own misdeeds. When pressed about believing the promises of a murderous international pariah, McDermott said, “I think you have to take the Iraqis at their face value,” but he offered no such quarter to the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. “I think the president would mislead the American people,” he declared.
On the eve of the war, three sitting U.S. Congressmen treated Saddam Hussein as President Bush’s moral superior.
The Iraqi media multiplied the propaganda value of their visit. The Iraq Satellite Channel reported that the three were scheduled to “visit hospitals to see the suffering caused by the unjust embargo.” Yet the three expressed no regrets for acting as Saddam’s stooges. Jim McDermott told CNN’s Jane Arraf, “If being used means that we’re highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children, then yes, we don’t mind being used.”
Unholy Alliance, Meet the Party of Defeat
We now know they were indeed being used by a hostile leader with an anti-American agenda. They were also doing the bidding of a domestic fifth column inside the U.S. Islamist movement. The Associated Press has reported that federal officials have indicted Michigan Muslim activist Muthanna al-Hanooti for “conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, illegally purchasing Iraqi oil, and lying to authorities.” For seven years, Al-Hanooti worked for the Detroit-area Muslim charity Life for Relief and Development. Investigators say for the first three of those years, he moonlighted for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). According to the Detroit Free Press, al-Hanooti is also, coincidentally, “former head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations.” He is current president of Focus on American and Arab Interests and Relations. After his stint with Saddam, al-Hanooti went on to become a paid lobbyist for the Iraqi Islamic Party, whose “philosophy is based on the Islamic Shari’a”and which has praised the “heroic Iraqi resistance.” That such a man could operate smoothly in the U.S. Islamist movement speaks volumes about its radicalism.
The feds assert that al-Hanooti earned his money compiling lists of Congressmen favorable to lifting the sanctions against the Hussein regime. This confirms Charles Duelfer’s finding that Saddam Hussein plotted to get UN sanctions lifted, so that he could resume his relentless pursuit of WMDs. To underscore the ineffectiveness of those sanctions, Saddam paid al-Hanooti two million barrels of oil diverted from the Oil for Food program, which he serially abused for his personal aggrandizement and to influence foreign policymakers.
Useful Idiots from Central Casting
What is remarkable about Bonior, McDermott, and Thompson is that apparently no bribe was necessary to procure their services; their ideology placed them at odds with their own nation’s security.
The three had acted on this ideology before and after the 2002 junket to Baghdad. Following the first attack on the World Trace Center, Vermont Representative, and self-professed socialist, Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment to cut a minimum of 10 percent of the funding of each intelligence agency ten times. David Bonior then Democratic Whip, voted for the Sanders amendment all 10 times. Bonior did all he could to end a 1990 FBI program to cultivate intelligence sources within the Muslim community...the kind of sources that could have prevented 9/11, or informed on al-Hanooti earlier. As a reward, Bonior received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Sami al-Arian.
Bonior left the Congress shortly thereafter, but “Baghdad Jim” stayed to carry on the good fight against his own country during the ensuing war. When U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, McDermott accused his miliary of complicity in a Republican war sham, saying they could have nabbed the Tikriti tyrant “a long time ago if the wanted.” After the New York Times and The Washington Post published articles disclosing the existence of classified anti-terrorism programs – the warrantless wiretapping of al-Qaeda partisans and the rendition of those captured, respectively – McDermott hailed the security breaches for “breaking through the administration’s secrecy.” Again, he blamed his own commander-in-chief, accusing President Bush of trying to impose “censorship”...of classified war techniques.
The Irrelevant Fallout
The history and ideological mania of the principals has long been known; only the official Iraqi sponsorship remained a mystery. Last night’s revelation leads to two conclusions:
First, the Democratic Party and its apologists will emphasize that the three Congressmen had no idea Saddam Hussein had financed their trip. They will point out it had been cleared by the appropriate offices of the U.S. government, shifting the blame to Bush administration bureaucracy. McDermott’s office has maintained the Washington State Democrat “thought the trip was put on by a Seattle church,”and a spokesman said the Congressman went only to observe “the plight of Iraqi children.” Rep. Thompson’s office has echoed that he had no knowledge of improprieties in the underwriting of his subversive sojourn.
It is almost certainly true that the three had no such knowledge. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd has stated that investigators “have no information whatsoever” to that effect. However, the government must make an exhaustive investigation to ascertain that this is the case.
Second, what the Left will obscure is the irrefutable fact that their prior knowledge is immaterial. The three knew beforehand that they were traveling to the capital of a nation, which had for years regularly fired on U.S. aircraft, as part of a tightly controlled tour of a dictatorship on the brink of defying its way into full-blown war with their constituents. And they shilled for the man who authorized the torture of rape of his children as though he had only their best interests at heart and as though he were prevented from expressing his immense love for his people only by heartless Republicans. After all, they deny health care to Americans; why wouldn’t they deny it to Iraqis?
In other words, when Third World dictators need someone to run interference, they know who to contact: leftist Democrats. Bonior, McDermott, and Thompson received nothing for their troubles, but al-Hanooti’s more than earned his bounty – yet as we note in Party of Defeat, “moderate” voices of the Democratic Party spoke not a word of condemnation. Democratic Minority Leader and 2004 presidential hopeful Dick Gephardt remarked merely that “every member has to reach...their own conclusion.” [sic.] When asked if he would condemn McDermott’s statements, conservative Texas Democrat and then-Congressman Martin Frost replied with a terse “No.”
When North Korean extremists need to stall for time to develop weapons for nuclear blackmail, they call Jimmy Carter. By 2004, the Axis of Evil nations endorsed John Kerry. On election eve, Osama bin Laden released a tape strongly influenced by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and his rhetoric since then has hewed closely to the Left’s party line – earning him an increasingly positive assessment from its membership.
Today, even as American troops are succeeding militarily via the surge strategy proposed by John McCain, the Democratic Left’s leadership demands unilateral withdrawal that would not merely maintain a thuggish and repressive, if stabilizing, status quo; it would vacate the battlefield, create a failed state, and give the perpetrators of 9/11 a new national base of operations.
But now, just as six years ago, certain leftists “don’t mind being used” by those with a thirst for massive bloodletting.
McDermott probably should have been courtmartialed when he was a Shrink for the Navy.
He is the poster boy/it of Hate America and love dictators and serial killers like Castro and Hussein.
Isn’t this what you immediately named:”The Treasonous Trio?” (or was that me?)(well heck, I cain’t rememer)
This is the most damning phrase in the whole article!!!
Why does no one in the Dem Party "pay any price" as Jack Kennedy once said? These bastards will never pay any price for ANYTHING they did/do, no matter how damaging to their own country it can be, or could have been ... NOTHING!!!
We all just look the other way even if it makes us barf!!!
Is it too much to hope for that the Napa County readers will remember this in November??? I wonder!!!
Follow The Money: Towards Treason (Dems Junket on Saddam’s Dime Undermines USA)
MelanieMorgan.Com ^ | March 26, 2008 | Melanie Morgan
And now for our trip in today’s Way Back Time Machine.
Let’s visit Iraq, shall we?
That’s where three United States Congressmen traveled in 2002, in the days before the Bush administration launched a war to depose Saddam Hussein, sparking a huge controversy.
Following Ben Bradlee’s excellent advice to Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate era to ‘follow the money’, the Associated Press has learned that Saddam Hussein’s secret agents financed the trip towards treason.
“An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, 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. At the time, the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq.”
One of those Congressmen is Mike Thompson who represents the First District of California, which spans the famous wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties.
My question for Thompson, David Bonior and Jim McDermott is this:
Who the hell did you think was financing your trip?
Or didn’t you think it was important enough to find out who wrote the check for your ‘fact-finding’ mission?
It ended, predictably, in a denunciation of President Bush and his efforts to depose a murderous despot who raped, torturted and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s.
Thompson is a disgusting person, who has lied about me in the past decade in a political debate over stupid liberal policies (but...but...but.. they care so much about the little people.)
As a state Assemblyman, Thompson was highly involved in efforts by the California Air Resources Board and the legislature to force a poison chemical (MTBE) in our gasoline, which ultimately led to the destruction of hundreds, if not thousands of water supplies in our Golden State. (Thanks to KSFO listeners, MTBE was banned in California in 2002.)
When we called out Thompson’s role in this environmental diaster, the hot-headed Congressman publicly accused my former co-host Lee Rodgers and me of ‘instigating violence’ against him.
He was referring to a drunk guy who showed up as his mother’s house and passed out.
Police reports dismissed the incident.
So count me among those who aren’t crying for Thompson’s troubles.
Or Bonior, or Baghdad Jim McDermott.
But my personal experience is that Mike Thompson is a despicable politican, with no more character than Tricky Dick.
In fact, he’s making Nixonian tactics look positively mischievous in comparison.
It will be in the racks until about 5:30 am tomorrow unless Thompson has his commie/islamo buddies buying and stealing the rack copies.
“Isn’t this what you immediately named:”The Treasonous Trio?” (or was that me?)(well heck, I cain’t rememer)”
That is too subtle for you or me.
John was NEVER charged with ANY specific charge of erroneous behavior!!! Melanie wouldn't leave it alone... how unfortunate and sad!!!
That's a knee slapper!!! Ha Ha Ha!!! (chortle)
It really makes me simmer, and one of these days I'm gonna BLOW.
...
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