'Baghdad' Jim McDermott Took Cash from Saddam Ally

NewsMax.com ^ | 5/01/03 | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[kattracks]

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who famously traveled to Baghdad last fall and pronounced President Bush a liar, accepted a cash payment less than a month later from an Iraqi-American businessman with ties to Saddam Hussein.

McDermott collected the payment from Shakir al-Khafaji, the same Detroit-based Baghdad apologist who paid former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter $400,000 two years ago to make a pro-Saddam documentary about Iraq.

Appearing live from Baghdad on the Sept. 29 broadcast of ABC's "This Week," McDermott proclaimed, "The president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war." The comment generated a firestorm of criticism in the U.S. that earned him the moniker, "Baghdad Jim."

A little less than a month later, on Oct. 25, McDermott accepted a check from al-Khafaji for $5,000, made out to the antiwar Democrat's "Legal Expense Trust."

McDermott set up the trust to fend off a lawsuit filed by Ohio Republican John Boehner stemming from McDermott's relationship with a Florida couple who wiretapped a 1997 conference call between Boehner and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, along with several other Republicans.

The revelation that on the eve of war, a pro-Baghdad U.S. congressman was accepting cash from a Saddam ally was first reported in this week's Weekly Standard.

The magazine said that the McDermott bombshell was uncovered amidst a treasure trove of Ba'ath Party documents discovered by coalition forces after the collapse of Saddam's government. Other documents in the same find indicated that George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of Britain's Parliament, may have accepted millions of dollars in payments from Baghdad.

The Galloway shocker was first reported by London's Daily Telegraph on April 22.

The staggering news that antiwar politicians on both sides of the Atlantic may have been on Saddam's payroll is fueling concerns that some of the antiwar coverage by Western reporters may have been bought and paid for by Baghdad.

As noted by the Standard, in 1991 the Wall Street Journal reported that Saddam's propaganda strategy included "waging an intensive, sometimes clandestine, and by most accounts highly effective image war in the Arab world" ranging from "financing friendly publications and columnists as far away as Paris to doling out gifts as big as new Mercedes-Benzes."

Today's Washington Times hints there may be a connection between Saddam's attempts to buy favor with influential Westerners and the failure of the U.S. media to devote much attention to the McDermott-Galloway story. Citing the Media Research Center, the Times reports:

"Although the Telegraph began reporting on documents showing Galloway's payoffs on April 22, it's been blacked out at ABC, CBS, NBC, as well as CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.

"'But the outlets most responsible to follow the money trail to Galloway and other anti-war voices are the outlets who promoted them on American airwaves,' said [the MRC's Tim] Graham, citing ABC's 'World News Tonight,' 'Nightline' and 'Good Morning America'; CBS' 'The Early Show'; and 'NBC Nightly News.'"

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Saddam Hussein/Iraq

[Starrgaizr]

Staggering news? Clinton took how much from the Chinese? $5,000 does not rise to the Galloway level of political peril. Now if he took cash prior to changing his views, then maybe. Scott Ritter is a more interesting candidate so far.

[MizSterious]

I suspect this is just the $5,000 we know about.

[Catspaw]

Gee, I'm just shocked beyond belief that McDermott would take money from Scott Ritter's benefactor. < /sarcasm>

[Blue Screen of Death]

Anyone want to bet if this story ever runs in the Seattle P-I?

[widowithfoursons]

McDermott got a pass from Trent Lott on the wiretapping issue. He is a crook from way back - makes the former Mayor Daley look like a choir boy.

[nicmarlo]

BTTT

[SwinneySwitch]

Get a rope!

[kcvl]

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.

[Catspaw]

Anyone want to bet if this story ever runs in the Seattle P-I?

Not a chance.

And don't bother holding your breath waiting to see if it shows up in the P-I, either.

[katana]

It was the "$ 400,000 given to Scott Ritter two years ago" that caught my attention. I certainly don't take Newsmax reporting as gospel, but I don't recall hearing that before. It's a startling charge and, if true, explains a lot about Mr. Ritter's behavior. Has anyone seen other reports or documentation (outside Newsmax) for that assertion?

[Mister Baredog]

This should cement his reelection bid. Claiming to be a Vietnam vet it turns out he did his "tour" in Long Beach CA.

[NativeNewYorker]

Get a rope!

Yes, get a rope.

[Catspaw]

Ritter took around $400k from this Iraqi, a good friend of Saddams, to make a "documentary" about Iraq. If you do a FR search on "Ritter," you can turn up a number of threads. This one has links to the stories about Burger King Boy:


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/750148/posts

[Mister Baredog]

Has anyone seen other reports or documentation (outside Newsmax) for that assertion?

Ritter brags about it. It was susposidly to make a (anti-American) movie.

[sinkspur]

McDermott got a pass from Trent Lott on the wiretapping issue.

McDermott's in the House; Lott's in the Senate.

Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House when the wiretapping incident took place.

[VOA]

bump

[widowithfoursons]

But it was Trent who defended him.

[katana]

Thanks. I'm embarrassed I missed that but I did. Maybe it's brought up every time the SOB shows his face on TV, it certainly should be, but I seem to have missed that too. Finally, I wonder if he's paid all the income taxes due on that money (around $150,000 at least).

As it's old news and the IRS would of course have been on the case I guess I shouldn't raise a fuss. It's just that a one ton load of bricks of some kind landing squarely on top of that pedophilic POS seems long overdue.

[kcvl]

Clear and present danger?

The first thing you need to know about this 2000 documentary, which explores the thwarted efforts of UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) to oversee the disarmament of Iraq, is that writer-director Scott Ritter is the former U.N. weapons inspector who noisily resigned from his position as head of the committee's Information Assessment Unit in 1998. The second is that $400,000 of the film's $500,000 budget came directly from the coffers of Iraqi-American businessman Shakir al-Khafaji, who, like Ritter, is determined to see ongoing economic sanctions against Iraq lifted. As the film's Senior Executive Producer, al-Khafaji accompanied Ritter to Baghdad and helped arrange interviews with various Iraqi officials, including Iraq's deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. Ritter's writer-director credit, which makes it clear that he's calling the film's shots, doesn't appear onscreen until the end of the film. So his talking head appearances throughout — which position him as one among a handful of experts, who include former UNSCOM executive chairman Rolf Ekeus, former UNSCOM spokesperson Tim Trevan and Aziz — are at best disingenuous, and worst betray evidence of bad faith. The film opens with a fairly straightforward question: Why did the UN fail in its mission to disarm Iraq, and who is ultimately responsible? The answer is nowhere near so clear. The film traces Ritter's career with UNSCOM, founded in 1991 to oversee the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and guard against their future reconstitution. From the outset, there was widespread suspicion that Iraq's official declarations concerning its weaponry were less than truthful, and former-marine and intelligence analyst Ritter was brought in to help investigate Iraq's claims. Ritter agreed that Baghdad was lying, but also began to suspect that neither the UN Security Council nor the Clinton administration were fully committed to the mission, and that the U.S. intelligence community actually wanted to use Ritter's team to provoke a military confrontation with Iraq. The facts are all a bit cloudy. Contradicting his 1998 assertion that Saddam Hussein remained a serious threat, Ritter here claims that by 1995 UNSCOM had, in fact, effectively disarmed Iraq. Ritter calls Iraq a "defanged tiger" — even as his film acknowledges that the Iraqis, who never fully came clean about their cache of chemical and biological weapons, were definitely hiding something — and suggests the U.S. turn its attentions elsewhere. Released into theaters at a time when military confrontation between the U.S. and Iraq again seems immanent, a clear, unbiased documentary examining of the UNSCOM debacle would benefit anyone attempting to make sense of the dire situation. This, unfortunately, is not that documentary. — Ken Fox