[Enchante]

ping to Saddam’s oil-for-food corruption scam buying some “useful idiots” from the Democrat Congress

[Fedora]

Thanks for the ping! I was particularly interested in an item buried towards the bottom of the Yahoo version of the story I read (apparently excerpted in the first post as I don't see this detail there), mentioning the trip was set up by a Seattle church group. The group is unnamed in the article, but for some relevant details see my prior post:

Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity

Accompanying the Congressmen to Baghdad was Iraqi agent Shakir Al-Khafaji, who later paid McDermott a check.94 Also travelling with the Congreessmen was the Church Council of Greater Seattle, an antiwar religious coalition, and joining them in Baghdad was a delegation led by Bert Sacks of Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq, a Seattle-based affiliate of Voices in the Wilderness which had begun traveling to Iraq with Ramsey Clark’s IAC in the 1990s.95 IPA again handled media relations for the trip, issuing press releases listing media contacts that included Mission to Baghdad participant James Jennings as well as Sacks.96

While looking this up I found a lot of information on the broader Seattle network involved in arranging this trip, some of which is indicated in the footnotes at the end of the original post.