'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

[kcvl]

Over the past two years, Mr. Ritter has taken $400,000 from Shakir Al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American businessman with ties to Saddam, to produce a documentary called, "In Shifting Sands." Mr. Ritter concedes that Mr. Al-Khafaji is "openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad." And that may be an understatement. Mr. Al-Khafaji runs propaganda sessions for Saddam. Euphemistically known as "expatriate conferences," the biannual gatherings decry the "terrorism and genocide" the U.S. commits against the Iraqi people through U.N. sanctions.

Mr. Ritter claims Mr. Al-Khafaji had no editorial input on the film project, a claim he undermines by openly admitting that his benefactor is responsible for arranging Mr. Ritter's interviews with high-ranking Iraqi government officials, including chief propagandist, Tariq Aziz. Even before his project was completed, Mr. Ritter predicted at a press conference that "the U.S. will definitely not like this film." These contacts no doubt helped Mr. Ritter earlier this month, when he returned to Baghdad and became the first American to speak before the Iraqi National Assembly.

[MEG33]

Bttt

[rface]

bump for a later read...

[not_apathetic_anymore]

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

But it'll FOR SURE show up on KING,KOMO, and KIRO TV right? /end sarcasm

[Billthedrill]

I see my prayers have been answered. Bookmarking this little gem for the next time that greasy SOB comes up for election.

[BallandPowder]

Powder..patch..Ball FIRE!

If he is guilty he should be hung with the cash stuffed in his mouth.

[Grampa Dave]

Is the tip of the iceberg that is connected to the smoking WMDS (WADS of MONEY to DEMOCRATS) from their uncle Soddomite?

[Howlin]

Oh I hope it is. I surely hope it is!

[Grampa Dave]

I'm sure that McDermott has been on the take from communists going back to the Nam days. Then, when the USSR went belly up, he prbbably let the Islomafacist Thugs like Soddomite buy him out.

[Shermy]

Check if his wife, relative has a "foundation" or business that's accepting money from suspect sources. That is a typical way politicoes launder money payoffs.

I remember the cell-phone case. I guess "that's politics", but for someone giving us so much face time about his morality it really is unbecoming - and revealing.

[Grampa Dave]

"Check if his wife, relative has a "foundation" or business that's accepting money from suspect sources. That is a typical way politicoes launder money payoffs."

Hopefully our Washington state Freepers are digging around.

[MadIvan]

You just found your Galloway.

Regards, Ivan

[talleyman]

Bump

[Grampa Dave]

So far he is just a G on the Galloway scale. However, it is a beginning!

[kcvl]

You are a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Seventh District of Washington. You have set up a legal defense fund named the Jim McDermott Legal Expense Trust ("Legal Expense Trust " or "Trust") for the purpose of paying legal expenses arising from the case of Boehner v. McDermott, a matter which is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. This fund is "separate and apart" from your principal campaign committee. You state that Representative Fortney H. (Pete) Stark of California and other members of Congress have offered to donate excess campaign funds to the Legal Expense Trust and have authorized you to ask whether such donations would be permissible under the Act.

Under Senate ethics rules, such accounts can accept up to $10,000 a year from individuals, PACs or corporations, but not from registered lobbyists or foreign agents.

[kcvl]

Rules are slightly different in the House, where contribution limits are $5,000 a year.

[BOBTHENAILER]

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."

I hope your WMD theory is true. If so, that legal expense trust better be very big.

[kcvl]

Saddam's Cash

From the May 5, 2003 issue: And the journalists and politicians he bought with it.

by Stephen F. Hayes

05/05/2003, Volume 008, Issue 33

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

[kcvl]

As the Galloway affair makes clear, these practices continued throughout the 1990s, despite the increased scrutiny of Iraq's financial dealings by the United Nations. Before the recent conflict, says Tareq al-Mezrem from the Kuwaiti Information Office, the Iraqi regime gave journalists luxury "villas in Jordan, Tunisia, and even Lebanon."

Some of the transactions were straightforward cash payments, often in U.S. dollars, handed out from Iraqi embassies in Arab capitals--luxury cars delivered to top editors, Toyotas for less influential journalists. "This was not secret," says Salama Nimat, a Jordanian journalist who was jailed briefly in 1995 in that nation for highlighting the corruption. "Most of it was done out in the open."

Other transactions were surreptitious or deliberately complex--coveted Iraqi export licenses for family members of politicians, oil kickbacks through third parties, elaborate "scholarship" arrangements. In a region where leaders count their fortunes by the billion and workers by the penny, such payoffs are common. The Saudis, of course, have financed public works throughout the Middle East and Africa. But no one played the game like Saddam Hussein.

SNIP

"For years, the Iraqi leader has been waging an intensive, sometimes clandestine, and by most accounts highly effective image war in the Arab world," wrote Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Geraldine Brooks in an exposé published February 15, 1991. "His strategy has ranged from financing friendly publications and columnists as far away as Paris to doling out gifts as big as new Mercedes-Benzes."

That campaign continued until days before the regime was deposed. "If they're not bought and paid for, they're at least rented," says a top national security official, who adds that the administration has intelligence implicating big-name journalists throughout the Arab world and Europe.

"I could give you lots of names," says Tareq al-Mezrem. "Everyone knows them on the street. Everyone knows this information."

In a series of interviews conducted in Kuwait City and Washington in recent weeks, Arab journalists and media experts said the same thing. Several of those interviewed, with assurances of confidentiality, provided names, lots of them. If their reports are accurate, the Iraqi regime's "modest media strategy" so appealing to Reuters' Marr was actually an elaborate scheme to buy victory in the propaganda war with the United States.

"To lots of people, Saddam Hussein and his regime was a godsend," says a Washington-based columnist for a prominent Arabic-language newspaper. "Only a few journalists [in the Arab world] didn't take money from him."

[kcvl]

Saddam began to realize the importance of good press. "Media people were paid monthly by the Iraqi embassy in Amman," says Nimat, "in cash. They were also given presents, like cars and expensive watches." And Saddam built a "housing complex for the Jordanian Press Association" in Amman, according to Nimat, at a cost of $3 million.

Saddam bought good press in less obvious ways, too. "He would award big contracts to newspapers in Jordan to publish all sorts of stuff, like Iraqi schoolbooks and other things," says Nimat. "The contracts were worth millions, and no one ever found out if they ever printed the books. No one cared."

Saddam got what he wanted. His atrocities mounted, but newspapers in Jordan--even those that offered pointed critiques of Jordan's King Hussein--would print nothing critical of Saddam Hussein.

"It's been going on for almost a quarter century," says Nimat. "In the newspapers in Jordan, you wouldn't have seen anything negative about Saddam Hussein. I don't want to generalize too much, but many of the editors were bought by the regime."

"What Saddam did in Jordan, he did in other poor countries in the region like Egypt and Yemen and Mauritania," says Nimat.

One "top Egyptian editor" told the Wall Street Journal back in 1991 about a conversation he had with Saddam. "I remember his saying, 'Compared to tanks, journalists are cheap--and you get more for your money.'"


MANY OF THESE CORRUPT PRACTICES are confirmed in a CIA report entitled "Baghdad's Propaganda Apparatus" obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The report indicates that the Iraqi regime redoubled its information efforts in 1998.