[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.

[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."