Escaped Minister Says He Fled Iraqi Jail ‘the Chicago Way’ Published: December 20, 2006
BAGHDAD, Dec. 19 — In a lengthy phone conversation on Tuesday, the former Iraqi electricity minister who escaped from a Baghdad jail on Sunday ridiculed American and Iraqi officials and said he fled because he did not trust the police and had received a tip that he would be assassinated within days.
*snip* If correct, Mr. Alsammarae’s tale of escape would mean that he not only worked his way free of the Iraqi police guarding the jail but also eluded the thousands of Western and Iraqi security forces stationed in the dense maze of checkpoints and blast walls in the Green Zone, which is the fortified heart of the American occupation and the Iraqi government.
When asked how he could have pulled off such an escape, Mr. Alsammarae, who moved to Chicago in 1976 but returned to Iraq just after the invasion, laughed uproariously for 20 seconds. Then, recycling a famous line from an exchange about Al Capone in “The Untouchables,” Mr. Alsammarae said with undisguised glee: “The Chicago way.”
Note: the other man pictured with Rezko and Obama in the RNC video ad is Nadhmi Auchi, nefarious Iraqi billionaire.
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Connecting the Dots: Obama, Rezko, Auchi, Alsammarae, and the Iraq kleptocracy
October 6, 2008
Last evening, October 5, 2008, ABC Radio talk show host John Batchelor and ex-DoD Jack Shaw continued their discussion of Iraqi-British billionaire businessman Nadhmi Auchi and corruption of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that led to corruption of the Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq, i.e. Iraq as a kleptocracy.
Jack Shaw is the former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security and a former aide to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Listen to their podcast here during the second hour (at approximately the 28 min. mark).
http://dmm.broadchoice.com/www.johnbatchelorshow.com/podcast/
*snip*
Former Iraqi Minister of Electricity, Aiham Alsammarae
In the same context, Shaw and Batchelor also discussed Aiham Alsammarae (right), the former Iraqi Minister of Electricity (and former classmate with convicted political fixer, Antoin “Tony” Rezko) who was convicted of corruption October 2006 in Iraq, escaped first to Amman, Jordan, in December 2006 and returned to his Chicago home, and the alleged dismissal of charges against him by the Iraqi government. Alsammarae is once again involved in his homeland, Iraq, according to reports.
RW/RBO has written numerous articles about Alsammarae, his connections to both Rezko and Obama, as well as his apparent return to operations in Iraq.
Auchi and alleged Iraq reconstruction corruption:
In his February 28, 2005, NewsMax article Pentagon Document: U.S. Paid Pro-Saddam Figures, Chinese and French (now posted on the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics website), Charles R. Smith wrote about the alleged corruption. RW/RBO was contacted by NewsMax earlier this year and informed that the article had been pulled due to unsubstantiated material, specifically the following section:
Newly released Pentagon documents show that a former member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle has resurfaced inside the new Iraqi government, bringing charges of corruption, bribery and bid-rigging.
The documents also indicate that many firms – including French and Chinese ones that had cozy relationship’s with Saddam’s regime – continue to reap millions in contracts from Iraq’s new governing authorities.
As a result, millions of U.S. aid dollars and billions in Iraqi government funds have disappeared in an ongoing scandal that is poised to engulf Baghdad and Washington.
Worse still, a leading candidate for the top elected post in Iraq has also been implicated in the report as having taken “payoffs” in order to rig a major government cell phone contract.
According to a May 2004 U.S. Defense Department report to the inspector general and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, a former financier and close associate of Saddam Hussein, Nadhmi Auchi, has “engaged in unlawful activities” such as bribing “foreign governments and individuals prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to turn opinion against the American-led mission to remove Saddam Hussein.”
In addition, the report noted that Auchi arranged “for significant theft from the UN Oil-for-Food Program to smuggle weapons and dual-use technology into Iraq in violation of UN and other International Export Control Regimes.”
But the U.S. liberation of Iraq has done little to put Auchi out of business. According to the official DoD report, during the U.S. occupation Auchi has organized “an elaborate scheme to take over and control the post-war cellular phone system in Iraq.”
However, on September 23, 2008, RBO wrote about Nadhmi Auchi and the leaked DoD IG report, which backs up Smith’s February 2005 article.
http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/connecting-the-dots-obama-rezko-auchi-alsammarae-and-the-iraq-kleptocracy/